ESPN 3D Says It’s Ready to Bow, With or Without More Affiliates

"When we launched HD seven years ago, we had some very good customers of ours step up and join us for that launch,” said Bryan Burns, ESPN vice president of business development. “We started with a very small base,” he said. “With Comcast and DirecTV, we'll start with about 40 million of what we call ‘available to’ households, and that is so much bigger” than ESPN had at ESPN HD’s start, he said. With DirecTV’s national reach, ESPN also is happy that ESPN 3D will get the maximum exposure at the point of sale for retailers who want to promote it, he said.

Even if it signs on no additional ESPN 3D cable or satellite affiliates in the days and hours leading up to Friday’s debut, “we're still so far ahead of where we were the last time, and we're very, very pleased with our position,” Burns said. As for whether ESPN would have predicted back at CES it would land only Comcast and DirecTV for ESPN 3D’s debut, Burns said: “I don’t think we made expectations seven years ago and we didn’t make them this time as well. We simply didn’t know.” Burns declined comment when asked about why other cable or satellite companies haven’t signed on for ESPN 3D’s debut. “You'll have to ask them,” he said. (See the separate reports in this issue.)

ESPN at first thought that 3D TV would take off more slowly than HD, but now has higher expectations, Burns said. One reason: ESPN had fathomed that CE makers would run many commercials advertising their 3D TVs, but didn’t expect to see them start until June or July, he said. That Panasonic and Samsung began in March blitzing the airwaves with 3D TV commercials “got our attention,” he said. “The premise that we had started to work under was spot on, but off on time, because the consumer electronics firms hit our air with commercials faster than we thought they were going to. That gave us pause to think, OK, maybe this is going to happen a little faster than we thought it was going to."

Lower average selling prices for 3D TVs compared with pricing of the first HDTV sets is “the big delta” differentiating the debut of 3D TV from that of HDTV, said Chuck Pagano, ESPN executive vice president of technology. He recalls the first HDTV sets priced in the tens of thousands of dollars compared with $3,000 for a Panasonic 3D plasma TV, he said. “Also going forward, every set is going to have the 3D capability built into it whether you want 3D or not,” he said, and that bodes well for economies of scale at the factory pushing prices lower.

ESPN 3D will celebrate its debut with a media event Friday at its Bristol, Conn., headquarters, where it will showcase the Mexico-South Africa match for reporters. Having produced several live 3D test telecasts, including Masters golf in April and the USC-Ohio State football game in September 2009, ESPN “has developed best practices” for using 3D technology “in live game applications,” ESPN’s media advisories said. The tests have given ESPN “the ability to streamline workflow operations, adjust 3D camera positioning, perform transmission tests and gauge fan reaction to a 3D telecast versus a traditional telecast,” they said.

What will be unique about ESPN 3D’s live coverage of World Cup is that soccer’s world governing body, FIFA, not ESPN, will control the feed. “There is a plan coming together” for ESPN to promote ESPN 3D on the air, Burns said. “We have shot a ‘This is SportsCenter’ commercial in 3D. It’s being edited as we speak.” But he’s not sure whether the spot will run in time for World Cup, he said. “World Cup is a great way to start, but World Cup’s a world feed that we don’t produce ourselves. There’s a bunch of us who are quite excited about July 12.” That’s when ESPN 3D shows Major League Baseball’s Home Run Derby live. It’s the night before the All-Star Game on Fox, which DirecTV has said it will carry live in 3D. For ESPN 3D, the Home Run Derby is “our first chance to put our own hands on the wheel and push our own buttons,” Burns said.

To promote a better World Cup 3D feed, FIFA has run “a series of test matches” in France, “and our own people have flown there to be by their side, to hold their hands, work with them, give them our comments, give them our thoughts,” Burns said. ESPN also hired Sky’s number two director for soccer, Grant Best, to supervise, he said. Sky has beamed live 3D soccer matches weekly to 1,000 pubs in the U.K. “We've had our ability to be there as much as humanly possible to provide our input into what they're going to do,” Burns said. Still, he asked, “are we a little more nervous because we don’t have our hands on the switches? Yes, certainly that’s human nature. But we've done everything humanly possible to be able to assure ourselves that we've done all we can do."

So hard has ESPN worked on the ground with FIFA in South Africa preparing for World Cup in 3D that “we're questioning our own sanity,” Pagano said. “Are we looking at this too closely? Perhaps, but I'm glad we did it that way. Since this is the first one out of the gate, I think we're all fairly comfortable. There may be issues, who knows? But at least we're prepared from a contingency standpoint, from a production standpoint and a technical one.” Pagano is “actually very comfortable about the technical aspects of this,” he said. “And we're doing a lot of stuff there. But everything that’s come across my desk and in talking with my guys is that we're ready as best as we can be."

Meanwhile, to build its 3D preparedness for the fall’s college football season, ESPN late last month hired the Connecticut Thunder, a semi-pro football team, and booked Rentschler Field at the University of Connecticut, Burns said. The aim for live 3D was to “practice under simulated game conditions for a couple of days,” he said. It’s the “kind of thing that we're really doing that nobody really knows about,” he said. “We're in this search for testing and quality for our people. Camera angles are being tested, as is transmission back to Bristol, just to get us as ready as we possibly can. Since our fall is so predominantly on football, this is a good time for us to practice football.”