New 3-D TV channel in China
An interesting piece of 3-D broadcasting news:
China’s First 3D Entertainment TV Channel to Begin Operation in May
[Shanghai, China, Apr 10, 2007]
Shanghai Interactive TV Co., Ltd. (SiTV) will start out China’s first 3D entertainment television channel on May 1st. As Shanghai Media Group’s subsidiary specialized in digital television and VOD services, SiTV is currently the largest integrated operation platform of on-pay digital TV channels, operator of digital TV channels, media content and service provider in China. By end of this February, SiTV had 21 on-pay digital channels in operation, and over 5.7 million subscribers.
This new channel will be dedicated to broadcast television programs processed by special “3D technology”. Contents will range from natural science and animal documentary programs, entertainment programs, to sports events including the 2008 Beijing Olympics. On-pay digital TV subscribers can enjoy 3D visuals through a regular television set by wearing 3D TV glasses.
So, will this be field-sequential shutterglasses 3-D? Most likely, since the MPEG2 algorithm destroys colour purity, resulting in heavy ghosting and thus ruling out anaglyph encoding. Unless SiTV doesn't care about watchable 3-D, that is. Other than the field-sequential technique, the only other viable way of doing 3-D TV, at the moment, is lenticular 3-D for TV. But how many TV sets have lenticualr slabs on front of them? Plus, there is no standard for the resolution to be used, other than perhaps the resolution that StereoGraphics (now part of Real-D) uses for its 3-D TV sets.
And is there enough 3-D content available? There's always The Incredible Invasion of the 20,000 Giant Robots from Outer Space... The issue of the lack of 3-D content has always plagued 3-D TV channel upstarts, so it's time we all start producing more 3-D! The hunger is there...
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