Future of 3-D TV Murky as ESPN Ends Channel

That impression was cemented last week when ESPN, the nation’s largest sports network and an early adopter of 3-D technology, said it was turning off its three-year-old 3-D channel. A spokeswoman said the decision was “due to limited consumer adoption of 3-D services to the home.”

The news spurred debate about whether anyone would be left watching in 3-D soon, or whether anything would be available worth watching.

“Many in the industry have said over the last few years that if ESPN ever pulled the plug on 3-D TV, that would be the format’s final chapter,” Phillip Swann, the publisher of the industry Web site TVPredictions.com, wrote after ESPN’s announcement. “Today, it’s hard to deny that statement.”

The only other big 3-D channel, called 3net, a joint venture of Discovery Communications, Sony and Imax, said it was undeterred by ESPN’s decision. But 3net has had a hard time getting onto cable and satellite systems, and a Discovery spokesman said last week that “it’s our equivalent of R&D,” or research and development, hardly a rousing endorsement.

The format is healthier at the box office, but even there, only 36 films were released in 3-D last year, down 20 percent from the peak in 2011, according to the Motion Picture Association of America. Over all, 3-D box office revenue was flat.

When television manufacturers started to aggressively market the technology in 2010 — helped by the theatrical release of “Avatar” by James Cameron in December 2009 and fantastical ideas about how it would feel to be immersed in a sporting event or an action movie — skeptics predicted little consumer demand for 3-D television. They turned out to be right. Television owners generally rejected the glasses that were usually required to see in 3-D and found that the format was not as immersive as promised.

But pioneering networks like ESPN, which is controlled by the Walt Disney Company, learned much about what did and did not work in producing 3-D. In stadiums, for instance, 3-D cameras had to be closer to the field than traditional cameras.

ESPN televised 380 sporting events in 3-D, but the dedicated channel never became big enough to be rated by the Nielsen Company. That may be because it was sold separately from other channels; the research firm SNL Kagan recently estimated that it had “well under one million” paying subscribers.

Amy Phillips, an ESPN spokeswoman, said, “While we don’t necessarily have a gauge of the most popular, we do know from viewer feedback that big events like the B.C.S. National Championship Game and the tennis majors were fan favorites.”

Some Summer Olympics events were televised in 3-D last year, too. NBCUniversal has not said whether it will do that again during the Winter Olympics next February in Sochi, Russia.

Carolina Milanesi, a research vice president for Gartner, a technology research company, said the 3-D format suffered from “a chicken-and-egg situation where content wasn’t created because of low penetration of 3-D TVs in the home, and consumers were not buying 3-D TVs due
to the lack of compelling content.”

While many big-screen television sets now come with 3-D capabilities and glasses, most households with those sets rarely use them, if at all. “Our family falls in that category,” Ms. Milanesi said.

Data from DisplaySearch, a unit of the NPD Group, suggests that sales of 3-D sets are stronger overseas. For the 3net joint venture, that has been important.

“The content library is helping us across a number of business segments,” said David C. Leavy, a spokesman for Discovery. “Some Europe and Asia markets where there is more interest and competition among operators are doing deals with 3-D content.”

Meanwhile, the television manufacturers that had been pushing 3-D are now promoting a newer format, “ultra HD” or 4K, which promises four times the resolution of the high-definition sets that most Americans own. Never mind that in many cases the additional detail is not perceptible by the human eye; 3net has been emphasizing its production of programming in 4K, and ESPN said its experiments with that format would continue.

ESPN also left the door open to more 3-D programming, if only slightly.

“Creating quality 3-D telecasts takes skill and learnings specific to 3-D production — and we have more experience than anyone to do that,” Ms. Phillips said.

“If consumer adoption should take off in the coming years,” she said, “we have the knowledge and the expertise to ramp up quickly and deliver compelling programming.”

News Analysis: Message, if Murky, From U.S. to the World

At the global treaty conference on telecommunications here, the United States got most of what it wanted. But then it refused to sign the document and left in a huff.

What was that all about? And what does it say about the future of the Internet — which was virtually invented by the United States but now has many more users in the rest of the world?

It may mean little about how the Internet will operate in the coming years. But it might mean everything about the United States’ refusal to acknowledge even symbolic global oversight of the network.

The American delegation, joined by a handful of Western allies, derided the treaty as a threat to Internet freedom. But most other nations signed it. And other participants in the two weeks of talks here were left wondering on Friday whether the Americans had been negotiating in good faith or had planned all along to engage in a public debate only to make a dramatic exit, as they did near midnight on Thursday as the signing deadline approached.

The head of the American delegation, Terry Kramer, announced that it was “with a heavy heart” that he could not “sign the agreement in its current form.” United States delegates said the pact could encourage censorship and undermine the existing, hands-off approach to Internet oversight and replace it with government control.

Anyone reading the treaty, though, might be puzzled by these assertions. “Internet” does not appear anywhere in the 10-page text, which deals mostly with matters like the fees that telecommunications networks should charge one another for connecting calls across borders. After being excised from the pact at United States insistence, the I-word was consigned to a soft-pedaled resolution that is attached to the treaty.

The first paragraph of the treaty states: “These regulations do not address the content-related aspects of telecommunications.” That convoluted phrasing was understood by all parties to refer to the Internet, delegates said, but without referring to it by name so no one could call it an Internet treaty.

A preamble to the treaty commits the signers to adopt the regulations “in a manner that respects and upholds their human rights obligations.”

Both of these provisions were added during the final days of haggling in Dubai, with the support of the United States. If anything, the new treaty appears to make it more intellectually challenging for governments like China and Iran to justify their current censorship of the Internet.

What’s more, two other proposals that raised objections from the United States were removed. One of those stated that treaty signers should share control over the Internet address-assignment system — a function now handled by an international group based in the United States. The other, also removed at the Americans’ behest, called for Internet companies like Google and Facebook to pay telecommunications networks for delivering material to users.

Given that the United States achieved many of its stated goals in the negotiations, why did it reject the treaty in an 11th-hour intervention that had clearly been coordinated with allies like Britain and Canada?

In a Dubai conference call with reporters early on Friday, Mr. Kramer cited a few remaining objections, like references to countering spam and to ensuring “the security and robustness of international telecommunications networks.” This wording, he argued, could be used by nefarious governments to justify crackdowns on free speech.

But even Mr. Kramer acknowledged that his real concerns were less tangible, saying it was the “normative” tone of the debate that had mattered most. The United States and its allies, in other words, saw a chance to use the treaty conference to make a strong statement about the importance of Internet freedom. But by refusing to sign the treaty and boycotting the closing ceremony, they made clear that even to talk about the appearance of global rules for cyberspace was a nonstarter.

It may have been grandstanding, but some United States allies in Europe were happy to go along, saying the strong American stand would underline the importance of keeping the Internet open.