SES World Skies is getting ready to begin 3-D TV trials as it aims to place satellite at the forefront in terms of delivering 3-D media.
   Beginning in April, SES will work with broadcasters, programmers, TV manufacturers and technology providers in a series of tests aimed at accelerating the delivery of 3-D TV.
   Bryan McGuirk, senior vice president of media solutions at SES World Skies, says has been surprised at how quickly the 3-D TV market is beginnig to unfold. “I think the absolute critical mass surprised everyone. We expected one or two 3-D TV channel announcements, but five all at once? That’s impressive. I think the critical mass behind 3-D is going to accelerate adoption even faster than HD,” he told Satellite News.
   A series of announcements in January by companies such as ESPN and Discovery have helped kickstart the 3-D TV race, and for SES, which has been preparing for this market for a while, the timing works well, McGuirk said. “The 3-D TV ecosystem that we’ve just launched was in the works when the networks made their 3-D announcements. There’s no doubt we’re in the right place at the right time with the right idea,” he said.
   The 3-D test that SES will lead will include eight areas of the value chain, from content production to acquisition to programmers, McGuirk said. “There will also be formatting companies, whether it be chipsets or encoders, uplink and transmission players, reception players, pay-TV operators, hardware manufacturers, stores and distributors, and displays — from television sets to shutter glasses. I can tell you we’ve tried just about all the glasses and they work very differently, so once you start mixing all these pieces of the chain, you can begin to really evaluate the end results,” he said.
   In terms of what he hopes can be achieved over the next 12 months, McGuirk said, “Ideally, all the different formats will be tested. Look at frame compatible transmission: whether side-by-side, above-and-below, checkerboard, all these are possible when you take two pictures — left eye and right eye and try to transmit them at the same time. You can split the screen any which way and move them through the chain. We must figure out what works best, what bandwidths work best and what creates a consumer’s best home entertainment experience.”
   But transmitting 3-D signals could be more demanding than HD, McGuirk said. “I heard someone say this week that if you produce something bad in HD and it looks bad on the screen, you’re just a bad producer. If you produce a bad 3-D product, on the other hand, you can make people sick. So it is incumbent on all of us to get this right and put the best 3-D products out there, make it stable and really drive consumer acceptance. This is very important for the future of television and satellite, and we’re giving it that level of seriousness,” he said.
   With its experience in HD, SES believes it is perfectly placed to take advantage of the accelerating 3-D TV timetable. “Our leadership position in HD gives us the opportunity to look at the next wave of technology and how it will be adopted,” McGuirk said. “We have lived and thrived through one wave — in HD. Frankly, a lot of the unknowns and testing are familiar. If you look back to when HD began, there were some issues about how audio would work, how will it transmit and what bandwidths would offer an effective transmission. Many of the questions we lived through in the HD transition are very much real today in the 3-D TV world.”