And now, for something completely different…

[Keith Koby]

It’s my turn to rant…

No offense to my friends at ESPN, but, that channel was bad. The 3D was never great because shooting a live event is difficult as is and the 3D always had problems. But that wasn’t the real problem with that channel. It wasn’t the 3D as much as it was the compression. Cable cos were squeezing the frame compatible signal down a regular sized 15 mbs mpeg2 HD pipe. The picture is ~ twice as busy as a regular HD picture and the mpeg2 encoders just can’t keep up. You’d have artifacts all over the picture and it was really a miserable experience. If you kick it up to 18.75 mbs, it does better, but then you have engineers jump off a cliff because you’re giving up half a qam for a channel that has content running 12 hours a month or whatever. And even at 18.75 mbs mpeg2, 720p and 1080i 3D are not quite good enough. 1080p 23.98 is _ok_ at that bit rate, but of course, 24 is no good for live sports.

I’m speaking for myself here, not as a representative of any company. I’m very disappointed in the way that the broadcast industry destroyed 3d@home. We were in such a hurry to get 3D content up that we sacrificed quality for just some little bit of quantity. We sacrificed better technologies for the rush of being the first. The first 3D tvs available to consumers were really bad. The technology has improved remarkably in the last 2 years, but it doesn’t matter now. When the early adopters had to pay exorbitant premiums for a bad experience, the well was poisoned.

Keith