Monday August 31, 2009 – Stewart Wolpin
Imagine you've just completed the Thanksgiving feast – turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie: The works. Your body sinks into the sofa as the tryptophan and alcohol sends you gently in-and-out of consciousness. Just as you enter REM sleep, you're blasted awake by a loud shriek: "Time for dinner!"
Dinner?! You just stuffed yourself!
Like the after-effects of a big holiday feast, America is sleeping off the long digital TV transition. Instead of turkey, we've consumed a bellyful of dire government entreaties to make sure we have a tasty new HDTV, a side dish of digital cable box and a digital converter desert. After this HD smorgasbord, we are now happily dazed in our digital torpor.
Wake up! Panasonic (and presumably the rest of the HDTV/Blu-ray equipment and content selling contingency) want us to do it all over again, this time to transition from 2D HDTV to 3D.
Last week Panasonic held a number of small demonstrations of its 3D HDTV and 3D Blu-ray products. Its stated plan is to start shipping 3D HDTV and 3D Blu-ray products in 2010.
What is Panasonic's 3D system? More on the technology here.
Why the rush?
Under a cloud of increasingly lower margins for flat-panel TVs and Blu-ray Disc devices, and the slower-than-hoped-for uptake of Blu-ray devices, TV suppliers understandably see 3D HDTV as a tasty high-margin morsel next to the $99.99 Blu-ray Disc player. Consumers have only been snacking on low-cost smaller-screen LCD TVs during this nasty recession and now suppliers are busy in the kitchen whipping up the next high-margin TV technology.
A 3D home theater will require not only new 3D HDTVs and 3D Blu-ray players but also AV receivers, all equipped with the just announced HDMI 1.4 standard. Oh, and for this flavor of 3D TV, you’ll have to wear those stylish glasses.
3D HDTV is the perfect antacid to the current HDTV/Blu-ray market heartburns. Unlike Blu-ray with its hard-to-see qualitative improvements and hard to suss BD Live connectivity frills, 3D creates an immediate and compelling gulf between what was and what will be. For Joe Sixpack, the arguments for spending extra dough to improve from 480p and 1080p might as well be a discussion between Albert Einstein and Neils Bohr about the merits of quantum mechanics.
The differences between flat TV/DVD and 3D HDTV/Blu-ray? (Insert your own humorous night-day metaphor here.)
The problem is America is still bloated from the digital transition meal. Now that millions have spent millions on new HD gear, how will they feel about being told they now have to spend again/more on new gear to get the real advantages of HDTV?
We suspect that most of us are going to push back from the table and say “We’re pretty full right now.”
Stay tuned.
