Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio, and I love all things tech and I'm a little under the weather today. But of course I don't want to leave you without a tech Stuff episode. So rather than skip a day, I thought we would have a nice little rerun episode. Uh. This one comes from August twelve, two nineteen, so not that long ago, and it is called the Death of three D Television. I hope you enjoy. So in this episode, I'm going to talk a bit about three D and how three D works, and then transition over to why television manufacturers were so gung ho on the idea in the first place, and why ultimately it failed because spoiler alert, no major television manufacturer is currently including three D TV capabilities in their sets. All right, So let's begin with the way three D actually works. Now, in the real world, we can perceive depth, right, the real world around us, we perceive in three dimensions, and we can tell how far away stuff is in general, or at least have a good idea about which things are closer to us. Than other things. If something is within twenty feet of us are closer, we can do that pretty easily with our depth perception. Beyond that we start to rely more heavily on visual cueues outside of stuff like parallax, so we can perceive objects actually have depth as well. Right, it's not just that we can see that something is closer to us than something else. We can see that that something has three dimensions, So it's not like the world just looks like a bunch of cardboard cutouts to us. Our brains use a lot of different in form ation and cues to create this three dimensional representation that we're taking in, but one of those is stereoscopic vision. This applies to people who have vision in both eyes. There are some people who do not, and for those people the technology and three D films and TV doesn't work. But for those of us who do have vision in both eyes, we know that our line of sight is slightly different for each eye. This is just common sense, right. Because the eyes are on either side of the nose, the left eye and the right eye are peering out from different positions, so we get slightly different angles of vision, and our brains take these two streams of data and combine them into a single representation, and that's where we get our three dimensional images. It's our brain taking that information and combining it to say, here's how I'm making sense of the world around us. But stuff like traditional photographs or drawings, or films and television present two dimensional images to us. Their images on flat surfaces, and thus they have no depth. Our brains can try to judge depth based upon the qualities within the image, as in I can tell that in this image, this one thing is closer than this other thing. But that also means our brains can be fooled if we take advantage of that way that brains work. This is the principle behind tricks like forced perspective, in which you position subjects in an image in such a way as to create the illusion of a significant difference in size. But it's not necessarily the case that one object or person is significantly larger or smaller than another. Rather, it has to do with the distance to the camera and the angle of the shot. So an example of this trick in action is found throughout the Lord of the Rings films, in which Ian McKellen, who played Gandalf, would often be positioned so that he was closer to the camera than the actors who were playing dwarves or hobbits, you know, the smaller creatures. The crew created special tables and benches and other pieces of furniture so that when they were shot from the correct camera angle, it looked like a normal table, and this supported the illusion that you were looking in on, say a six foot tall human like figure sitting down with three foot tall human like figures, when in reality the differences in the actor's heights was really much less dramatic. This trick works because there's no true depths in the image we're looking at, so the filmmakers can take advantage of that and create this illusion. A three D version makes this trick harder to pull off, since it requires shooting the scene from two different angles to simulate the experience of a person looking in on that scene with their own eyeballs, and so forced perspective in three D films is a lot harder to pull off. So that's the first part of three D technology. You shoot a scene with two cameras position such that they mimic how the viewer's eyes would look in on that scene, or sometimes this is done in a computer generated environment for example pre c g I films or for converted films. Will talk more about those in the second. But now you have two sets of images to show an audience right, You have one set for the left camera and one set for the right camera, and you will only want one set of images to go to each eye. Right, the images from the left camera have to go to the viewers left eye. The images from the right camera have to go to the viewer's right eye. But you're showing all of them on the same surface. Otherwise this the three D effect won't work. You would just have a mess of images on the screen. It would be a big jumble. So how do you tell the light which way to go? How do you tell the light from the left side just go to the left eye and the light from the right side to just go to the right eye for an audience full of people. Well back when three D films were first really becoming a fad in the nineteen fifties, it was typical to use filters on the camera's color filters. The left camera would have say a red lens filter on it, and that meant only red light could come through that filter. This is a matter of physics. A red object is one that absorbs all light except light that has wavelengths in the red spectrum. That light would reflect off the object. A red lens allows red light to pass through and absorbs all other light. Similarly, the right camera lens would have a blue filter on it, which meant only the blue light from a scene could pass through. So now you have two rolls of film of the same movie. They are shot from almost identical angles, but they are slightly offset, again to mimic the way our eyes are offset. One set of those images is from the camera with the red filter, and the other is from the camera with the blue filter. You take these developed pieces of film, you put them in a pair of projectors, also spaced just so, side by side, and you play them in sync with each other so that the sequence of images matches up. You have a red set and a blue set. So these are identical except for a slight difference in angle and of course their color. The audience puts on glasses that have red and blue lenses. The red lens will only let the images from the red filter camera pass through. The blue lenses on the glasses will only allow the blue images to pass through, and thus the brain gets two sets of images. If the cameras and projectors are properly aligned, this should create the illusion of a three dimensional image, and the audience will perceive depth and what is otherwise two sets of two dimensional pictures, which is pretty darn cool. Of course, that's the old way to do it, and it meant that you couldn't really get a full color film in three D. But there are other ways to get the same effect. The two main ways fall into the broad category of passive glasses and active glasses. Passive glasses work in a similar way to the red blue lens glasses, in fact, the same way, just through a different operating mechanism. They typically use polarized lenses, which will only allow light that is polarized in a certain way to come through the lens. Polarized sunglasses work in this way. Most polarized sunglasses will only allow light that is vertically oriented to pass through the lens, because horizontally oriented light is typically glare caused by light that's reflecting off of horizontal surfaces like the hood of a car. So by blocking that kind of light, the glasses eliminate glare. It also means that less light is coming to your eyes more than a second. So you can polarize light and lots of different ways, not just horizontally and vertically, including in circular patterns that are clockwise or counterclockwise or witter shens as I like to say. A clockwise polarized lens won't let light with a counter clockwise polarization through the same lens, and vice versa. The clockwise approach is important, by the way, because if you polarize lights so that's say, the left lens only allows horizontal oriented light to come through and the right lens only allows vertical oriented light to come through, it would require the audience to sit upright to watch the image to get the proper feeling, the proper effect. That might work at a movie theater, but at home it could be an issue for people who might say, lounge a bit while watching television. So if your head is at an odd angle to the screen, the lenses might not align properly with the light coming from the image, and thus the circular polarization helps bypass that particular problem. Otherwise, the process is pretty much the same as the red and blue version. Each camera has a special filter to only allow light polarized in a particular way to pass through the lens, or the projectors are fitted with special filters to polarize the light that they're projecting. These match the glasses, and we again get the two sets of images that, when viewed through this pair of glasses with the proper polarization, creates that illusion of a three dimensional image. Then we have active glasses. These are glasses that have liquid crystals in the lenses, and the liquid crystals can change shape and a fraction of a second, so in one orientation they block light from coming through the lens, and the other orientation they allow light to pass through the lens. They're kind of like very tiny window blinds that open and shut at an incredible speed. And the left lens and the right lens have crystals alternating these two orientations, so that when the left lens is letting light through and the right isn't, then you can get the left side, and then vice versa. The right side will let light through on the left, won't you get the right side. The shuttering is in synchronization with the film or the three D television, Otherwise that method wouldn't work, So you're only getting the left images when those are on display, You're only getting the right images when those are on display, and otherwise the the opposite lens is blocking light. So with these glasses, rather than having two sets of the same image projected on a movie screen simultaneously or on a television display, you only have one set displayed at any given instant. So let's say it's the first fraction of a second, only the image for the left eye is on display. The glasses worn by the audience open the shutters on the left lens and close the shutters on the right lens, so that the light only gets to the left eye of all the viewers. In the next instant, the image for the right eye is displayed and the glasses switch the shutters, so now the light can pass through the right lens but not the left. And this goes on, with the glasses shuttering over and over in sequence with the images on the screen, and it's all happening fast enough that our brains can't detect the changes. To us, it just seems like a continuous series of images coming right into our brains, like we're looking in unbroken sequence with both eyes at the same time, and our brains again construct this three dimensional representation. This approach helps correct a problem that a lot of other three D films have, which is that they tend to be pretty dark. You've got two sets of images on the same surface with the other methods of three D presentation. So if you read a lot of tech blogs or a lot of movie review sites that talk about the differences between three D versions of a film and the two D versions of the film, you'll often see commentary about how dark the three D version is in comparison, and that has a couple of things with it. That's partly because you have projectors with these polarized filters on them, so less light is coming from the projector to hit the screen. You're wearing glasses that also have polar rized lenses on them, so they're preventing some of the light from the screen to getting to your eyes. So that means the image is going to look darker to you, and it can make it challenging or even impossible to tell what's going on with a dimly lit scene. There's some filmmakers who try to counteract this by using, you know, actual effects in the making of a three D film to make a very bright image in the first place and avoid doing darker image stuff. But you can also get around this by actually just boosting the amount of light that the projectors is putting through the lens. You can essentially turn up the brightness on the projectors. That requires training a projectionist to be able to do this sort of thing, to calibrate a projector so that it is ideally working with the three D content, and a lot of places just don't do that. So there are a lot of projectionists who just they don't have the training to tweak things and make it calibrated so that you get a really good, uh, three D experience, And so the result is you get this kind of dark, muddy, out of focus almost experience. It's not ideal anyway. Uh. You you realize that there's not really a one size fits all approach to projecting films properly. You need to have that kind of training to really get the most out of it, and it's just just a fact that not a lot of places do that. Active glasses, however, which again don't have quite the same problems. They are the most technically complicated version of three D televisions and three D films, and it also means that the glasses themselves have to draw power from something which is typically a chargeable battery, and that means if you want to watch a three D film or TV show with active three D glasses, you need to make sure that those glasses are charged up first, or they may not work, they might conk out before the movie is over. And it also means they tend to be more expensive. So if you lose a pair of polarized glasses, that's already pretty expensive, but losing a pair of active three D glasses can really set you back a bit. When we come back, i'll talk about why the industry pushed hard for three D televisions and three D content and three D films, But first, let's take a quick break. Okay, I gave you a quick rundown on how three D works, and I could trace the history of three D back to early stereoscopic photographs up through the gimmicky tricks of the nineteen fifties designed to lure more crowds into movie theaters because of a fear that television was going to rob theaters of their audiences. But honestly, I've covered that in other episodes. And it's not really that relevant to this conversation about modern tell visions and the effort to get three D adopted as a standard feature in TVs. So what gives Well, First, it helps if we look at the rebirth of three D at the cinema. Now, apart from some fairly gimmicky films like Jaws three D, the three D craze had proven to be just sort of a fad from a bygone eram But that started to change in the first decade of the two thousand's, particularly with a film that came out in two thousand nine. So you do have filmmakers who are interested in using three D to enhance the experience they want their audiences to have while they are watching one of these directors films, and these filmmakers are exploring new ways to create movies and to tell stories. A great example of such a filmmaker is James Cameron, and in fact, his insanely successful two thousand nine film Avatar is a large reason why three D films took off. Shortly afterwards, Avatar smashed box office records and the effects were rightly louded by critics. People said the three D effects of this movie are like nothing we've ever seen before. It's not really an exaggeration to say that Avatar helped usher in the modern three D cinema age. A three D film requires different considerations than a standard two dimensional film, which can hide a lot of stuff just through lighting and camera angles and other simple tricks. A three D film requires a slightly different approach, often using the same tricks but tweaked for the three D filming process. It also requires twice as many people. You've got two cameras to run, not just one, so you have two camera crews. You've got a much larger staff. It's more expensive, and because it's more technically complicated, when things go wrong, it can take a lot more time to fix stuff. So it's not necessarily a better approach, but it is a different approach. Stuff like force perspective is a lot harder to pull off that way. It just means that you have to go about things in a different way if you want to get the most out of creating a three D film versus a two D film. Other films get converted into three D after they've already been shot in two D, so these movies were not shot in three D natively. So with this approach, you're taking a single two dimensional set of images. You know, that's what a film is. It's just a long sequence of two dimensional images. Then you have to take that and turn it into two offset series of images, one for each eye. Now this can be done, it could even be done well, but it's also really easy to do it poorly, and in any case, it can result in a movie that seems to be shot in three D for no apparent reason, like there's no thing in the film that benefits from the three D ness. With movies, a big motivating factor for studios and movie theater chains is that they can charge more money for a three D screening of a film. It's a premium experience. So if it's done well, it can be a really great experience for the audience. They can feel like it was worth the money. But whether it's done well or not, it drives up ticket prices. You can charge more for those tickets, and driving a ticket prices is a good way to generate a lot more revenue, particularly in the early stages of a film's release, and that means you can turn up the hype machine, because if your film breaks some box office records. You can use that to try and get more folks who haven't yet seen the film in theaters to come check it out. And you don't necessarily need to sell more tickets than the previous record holder if the tickets you're selling are more expensive. So, in other words, let's say you are selling cookies at fifty cents each and I swoop in on your turf and I start selling cookies for a dollar each. But I also say that my cookies have some feature about them that makes them superior. Let's say I'm using the claim that the ingredients in my cookie are all natural, for example, then I can make more money than you, even if you sell more cookies than I do. If you sell five dozen cookies at fifty cents each, well you netted yourself thirty bucks, which isn't bad. Now, let's say I sold four dozen cookies, so twelve cookies fewer than you did, but I charge a dollar each, so I met myself forty eight bucks. You sold more cookies, but I brought in more revenue. Three D films can help studios and theaters achieved the same thing. If we were just looking at the number of tickets sold. The story would be different. So there's a strong business case for three D content in movie theaters, particularly in an age where the average person is going to the cinema less frequently. Since two thousand one, the per capita tickets sales in the United States has been on a fairly steady decline, with a couple of bumps every other year or so. One way to combat this is to offer up an experience that is hard to replicate at home, a high fidelity experience with booming surround sound, crisp images, and occasionally three D effects that can help convert someone from I'll just watch it when it's available for streaming to let's go to the theater and check this out. Another motivation for three D films on the studio side is that they seemed like a good solution to a problem of debatable magnitude. That is the problem of movie piracy and bootlegging. Now, I've done episodes in which I've talked about movie piracy in the past, but let's do a quick overview. First. Piracy isn't cool, guys, that's just you know, true. My philosophy is that if you think something is worth the price, then you should pay that price in order to experience whatever that thing is. If you think something is not worth the price, if you think they're charging way too much for that, then you don't pay the price and you don't experience it. That's how you can get the prices to come down. You just say like, well, I just don't think it's worth it, so I'm not gonna bother if it was. If you feel like it wasn't worth it, why would you worry about it? Now? If you think it's worth the price, but you're not willing to pay that price. So in other words, you're just saying, it's probably worth the twenty bucks to see it, but I'm not gonna pay twenty bucks to see it. I'm just gonna steal it. Well, that that makes you a jerk. That's that's all that works out. So pirating isn't really cool. Now that being said, the movie studios have a narrative around piracy that isn't really supportable. So well, I agree that piracy is not good. I also say that movie studios have blown it way out of proportion. See, the narrative is that movie piracy directly translates to lost revenue, and that's just not really supportable. If someone bootlegs a copy of a movie and then makes it available in people who otherwise would never go see the movie download the film to watch it. You can't really claim that the movie studio is out any revenue. After all, those pirates were never going to pay to see the movie at all, So, in other words, there's no difference to the movie studios bottom line if those people pirated the film or they didn't, because they were never going to buy a ticket in the first place. Either they were going to pirate the film and watch it for free, or they weren't going to pirate the film and not watch it at all. Either way, you don't get a ticket sale. Now, some of those people might have been willing to buy a ticket before they got hold of a pirated copy. Those people could potentially represent cases of lost revenue, but it's impossible to determine how many of those pirates would have otherwise bought a ticket, which means it's impossible for movie studios to give an actual amount as to the magnitude of lost revenue. And since movies studios used these very large estimates to justify lobbying for stiff penalties whenever they pursued cases, against pirates. They were able to win some pretty draconian victories against people using pretty flimsy justification. This was all in an effort to terrify would be pirates in order to discourage the practice. At the same time, the goal was to find ways to coax people into movie theaters, something that the theater chains also wanted to have happened for obvious reasons. And finding ways to create an experience that's not really easy to replicate at home was part of this strategy. With the success of Avatar, three D films became a big part of that strategy. It was hard to bootleg a three D film, so the super jen Kie way where you set up a camera inside a movie theater just didn't work. You know, the image would be even worse than a typical bootleg made in that way. And if you could get your hands on a digital copy, something that has happened on numerous occasions with different films, the image would be better, but you would still need a compatible three D television and glasses set up, or you wouldn't actually be able to watch the content in three D. And of course you could potentially get hold of a two D version of the movie, but then one of the big selling points of the film wouldn't be available to you. So three D was seen as a way to convince people to go to a theater to see a movie, rather than to pirate it or wait around. And this trend found its way to television manufacturers who saw the potential to advertise to home theater enthusiasts who did want to get the closest approximation of the cinematic experience in their own home setups. See One of the reasons three D televisions became a thing is that TV companies need to create a compelling reason for people to go out and buy a television. This is an arc we can follow whenever a new television technology really takes off. Initially, only a small percentage of the market adopts it, typically because the tech tends to be pretty expensive when it first debuts and there may be a shortage of content that you can watch on this new tech of television. So, for example, we saw this with the invention of color TV in the nineteen fifties. Color TV actually followed not long after black and white television first started to get a real foothold. After the end of World War two, our c A and CBS competed fiercely to create the standard for color television. Eventually, our c A pretty much won that battle after some initial setbacks, but I covered that in my r c A episodes. But even though the tech was there, widespread adoption did not fall immediately. In fact, it took quite some time. So for one thing, only a few programs were being broadcast in color. In fact, for a long time in BC was the only network broadcasting anything in color, so a color television only had a slight advantage over older black and white sets. Why would you buy a color TV if there are only a couple of programs that are in color. Studios pushed hard to expand the options, with companies like Disney doing a lot to promote the advancement of color television. But price was another barrier. Television's were and are expensive. Many households don't have the extra money laying around to upgrade to the latest update to technologies like television's. The expectation was that you would buy a television set and then you pretty much use it until it stopped working, or maybe until the cost of repairing a television is more or less the same as buying a new one in the first place. For reasons like these, color television actually took a really long time to get a purchase in the US market, even by fewer than fifty of all households with a television had a color set. Similarly, we saw a trend like this emerge with high definition television. The transition from standard definition TV to h D t V was a fairly gradual one, and largely for the same reasons as the color TV transition we had seen in the sixties and seventies, though it took less time with HDTV, and we're seeing similarities with ultra high definition television sets to have two K or greater resolution. On top of that, you have other features like h D R and more. These aren't just tech advancements. These are sales pitches to get people to buy more televisions, because that's how businesses work. So for several years, companies like Sony, LG, Samsung, and many others really pushed three D capabilities. When we come back, i'll talk about how that played out, but first let's take another quick break. Companies were starting to experiment with three D television tech before, but that's the year of the industry really began to commit to the technology. Again, not coincidentally, because of Avatar's success, all the major TV manufacturers were pretty much on board. Most of them adopted the passive glasses strategy, a few were gambling with active glasses instead. A very few examples played with the idea of glasses free three D television demand. That's a big gamble. So with those sets, the screen itself acts in a way that's similar to a pair of three D glasses directing lights so that each of your eyeballs gets a different feed of information, as it were, But it also means to experience that three D effect, you need to be viewing the television from the proper angle. So you can imagine the TV surface and imagine that there's a wedge shape expanding out from the TV surface, and then imagine within that wedge you have slices kind of like a pizza or a pie. If you're in one of those slices, like in the middle, you get the three D effect. But if you're outside the wedge by being a little too far off to one side or the other, or if you are in a position where you're astride two slices like the slice goes down the middle where you're sitting or standing, you don't get the proper three D effect and it becomes hard to look at the screen anyway. The three D tech and television's worked more or less depending upon the specific implementation, but that's just part of the puzzle that needs to come together to make an innovation in TV technology a success. Yes, it has to work for it to be a success, but that's not the only quality. It has to have. Another is content, just like with color television and high definition television and now ultra high definition content. Without good three D content, this feature was doomed. Early on a few different media companies experimented with creating three D channels, and they included big names like ESPN. The provider Direct TV also had a three D channel, but both of them would stop broadcasting by two thousand thirteen. I'll get back to that in a second. The point is it's hard to sell a public on a platform if there's nothing on that platform. Fans of video game consoles have seen this happen time and time again. Arguably it's what doomed the Nintendo. We you there just wasn't enough compelling content available for the console. Another source of content was the promise of three D Blu ray discs, but to play one of these you needed a compatible Blu ray player, So if you had an old Blu ray player that was not compatible with three D technology, you would have to go out and buy a new one. You wouldn't just be investing in a brand new television, but also a brand new Blu ray player. Some companies were able to patch existing equipment to support three D content. Sony did this with the PlayStation three, and firmware updates to players could help remove some of the barriers to entry, but it wasn't a universal practice, and it didn't always mean that the experience you got was as good as if you went out and bought a new Blu ray player that could support it. Natively, so it was a fix for some platforms, but not an ideal one. On top of all that, there was the problem of three D quality in general. Now I'm not talking about how the television is displayed three D, although if you didn't tweak the settings just right you would have a pretty shoddy experience in the home. I am actually talking about the quality of the content itself. The floodgates opened after Avatar's crazy success, and so there were the movies that had been shot in three D to begin with, which weren't guaranteed to be better, but had advantages over the other type of three D content, the aforementioned converted to D films that have been turned into three D. Many movies included gimmicks of stuff seeming to emerge out from the screen. That's a three D trick that's been around since the nineteen fifties, and rather than create an immersive experience, these tricks seemed to call too much attention to themselves. It actually tends to pull people out of the movie. You you're laughing at something that's happening, because it's so far outside the realm of a typical movie experience that pulls you out of it. There are several analysts and television manufacturing representatives who actually blame the poorer performance of three D television sales on the ratio of bad three D content to good stuff. In other words, there was just too much crappy three D out there, and there wasn't enough good to really make it compelling. Then, of course you have to buy or rent the blu ray discs that you would play on your compatible Blu Ray player, and then adds yet another expense to this technology. And if the television comes with fewer sets of three D glasses, then you have people in your household, then you have to shell out even more money to make sure everyone has a glasses set. And complicating matters was that the Blu Ray format itself was starting to struggle in the market at this same time. While the quality of Blu Ray films, both from a picture and sound standpoint, was superior to most other home entertainment options, it wasn't nearly as convenient as emerging cloud based streaming services like Netflix, Amazon's prime video service, Hulu, and things like that. Consumers were favoring convenience over image and sound quality, which has been a pretty steady trend throughout media history see also the music industry. By two thousand nineteen, there were really only two services to stream three D movies, at least legally. Those were Voodoo and the PlayStation Video Service. You couldn't get three D streaming on the more popular mainstream services out there, and this contributed to the lackluster usage data around three D televisions. On top of that, people were watching less content on their television's in general, and watching more stuff like that on tablets and smartphones. The shift in consumer behavior had no real place in it for three D television. The glasses themselves also represented a challenge. Many customers didn't like the idea of having to put on a pair of glasses just to watch a movie in their own homes and admit having to keep track of yet another peripheral on top of mundane stuff like remote controls. Plus, if you damaged or lost a pair, it wasn't a pretty big expense to replace them, usually in the range of a hundred dollars per pair of glasses. So the general consensus was that three D glasses are expensive and a hassle. Plus, some people found that the glasses would be uncomfortable, and they could contribute to problems like eye strain or headaches and generally create an unpleasant experience. Lots of folks have issues like this with three D films as well, so this isn't just something that happens to people watching three D television. There are people who have generally unpleasant experiences watching three D films. I tend to fall into that camp. Actually, if a film is showing in three D and two D, I almost always pick the two D version. I will see a three D film if I feel like it was made specifically with the intent to be a three D film, at least in some cases, but those are rare exceptions because I do tend to find the experience to be unpleasant. Three D TV sales never quite matched the marketing efforts that these companies were putting forward. The numbers did go up, though that may largely be because many models sold in the first few years following two had three D capability baked into them, so you could argue that people were buying these sets not because they were three D capable, but rather they were in the market for a brand new television, and all the brand new televisions also had three D support built into them. Even if people were buying them because of the three D capability, before long it became clear that most folks just weren't using that feature. So you had a lot of people holding back from buying a three D television, perhaps because of the price or just in general sense that they wouldn't get much out of it. And then you had the people who would buy the three D TVs, but they never or very rarely ever watched three D content on them. The House of cards really came down, tumbling down pretty quickly. It wasn't a complete shambles until about two thousand and seventeen. Now I already mentioned that three D channels like ESPN's special three D cable channel went off the air. By that was an early warning sign. The expense and technical challenges of producing good three D content were just too high. Companies were not seeing a good return on investment. If the money had been there, then those channels would have stuck around, but it just wasn't there. The manufacturers began to abandon three D features to video pulled the plug early, and which was a pretty prescient move, as it turns out. Sam Sung would hold on until two thousand and sixteen and then stopped including three D support in their television's. L G and Sony were the last two major television manufacturing companies to offer three D support. They stopped in two thousand seventeen. On the film front, three D screenings have not been doing very well in the United States over the last few years. In the wake of Avatar, three D screenings began to make up a pretty good part of the overall revenue for ticket sales, but the glood of two D films converted to three D, the horror viewing experiences, that kind of stuff may have contributed to a general feeling of disillusionment over the quality of three D movies. Or maybe it's the premium prices that audiences object to. Whatever the reason, three D ticket sales at the US have been on the decline for several years. Then again, this is complicated by the fact that ticket sales in general have been on the decline, So it's possible the trend with three D films is merely keeping pace with the overall trend for movie ticket sales. But there's no shortage of articles out there that suggests that audiences in North America see very little added value with three D films in general and have come to reject them when going to the theater. In one place this isn't happening, however, is China. China has the most theaters capable of screening three D films in the entire world, and China represents a truly huge market for entertainment. It's such a big market that its shape. It's the actual content of films. So, for example, in two thousand twelve, the remake of Red Dawn debuted. The original film had come out in nine four, and it had been shelved for a couple of years that had actually been finished by but MGM, the production company that was behind it, got into some real financial difficulty, so the movie kind of set on shells for a couple of years. A different studio came in to become the production company, and at that stage they were looking at editing the movie and making a major change changing the invading army from Chinese soldiers to North Korean soldiers. The film it's China in two twelve, it's North Korea. So why is that, Well, it's because of the huge potential market in China. It was a political move. It was done to avoid ticking off a potentially lucrative market. They would never be able to sell the film in China if China are seen as the enemy in the movie. But then the movie never did release in China, so it's kind of a moot point. What I'm getting at is that the Chinese market is so huge, so significant to the entertainment industry that when movie studios are considering funding a film production. That's part of the consideration. So movies that are made for North America are often made for North America. And then you have an asterisk next to that that says and also China, but mostly China, so you might end up having a very different film than what perhaps the screenwriter or director originally intended. Anyway, that Chinese market is likely to keep the three D film industry alive because it is a fairly popular form of entertainment over in China. It may mean that we'll see more conversions, more two D to three D film conversions rather than native three D films, because again, unless it's a c g I film, it tends to require twice as much of a crew to run a three D shoot as a normal two D shoot, so it's a very expensive and complicated endeavor. So is three D dead in the United States? I would say it's mostly dead, But we do have the sequels to Avatar coming out that might have a bit of a at least a brief franchise specific revival, and we'll probably see three D come back and yet another incarnation in the future because it has happened before. But I think in general we're going to see fewer three D films, at least fewer films made in three D from the get go, and we probably will see a continuation of the trend of fewer people buying tickets to go see the three D films. But that's just my own opinion on that matter. This was really to trace how the fad failed to become a trend. Thank you so much for listening to text Stuff. I promise we'll have new episodes up very soon. Uh, just having an off day, really, it's nothing serious, but yeah, totally side checked me. So we will have some news shows up very soon. If you have suggestions for topics we should cover in episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio, and I love all things tech and I'm a little under the weather today. But of course I don't want to leave you without a tech Stuff episode. So rather than skip a day, I thought we would have a nice little rerun episode. Uh. This one comes from August twelve, two nineteen, so not that long ago, and it is called the Death of three D Television. I hope you enjoy. So in this episode, I'm going to talk a bit about three D and how three D works, and then transition over to why television manufacturers were so gung ho on the idea in the first place, and why ultimately it failed because spoiler alert, no major television manufacturer is currently including three D TV capabilities in their sets. All right, So let's begin with the way three D actually works. Now, in the real world, we can perceive depth, right, the real world around us, we perceive in three dimensions, and we can tell how far away stuff is in general, or at least have a good idea about which things are closer to us. Than other things. If something is within twenty feet of us are closer, we can do that pretty easily with our depth perception. Beyond that we start to rely more heavily on visual cueues outside of stuff like parallax, so we can perceive objects actually have depth as well. Right, it's not just that we can see that something is closer to us than something else. We can see that that something has three dimensions, So it's not like the world just looks like a bunch of cardboard cutouts to us. Our brains use a lot of different in form ation and cues to create this three dimensional representation that we're taking in, but one of those is stereoscopic vision. This applies to people who have vision in both eyes. There are some people who do not, and for those people the technology and three D films and TV doesn't work. But for those of us who do have vision in both eyes, we know that our line of sight is slightly different for each eye. This is just common sense, right. Because the eyes are on either side of the nose, the left eye and the right eye are peering out from different positions, so we get slightly different angles of vision, and our brains take these two streams of data and combine them into a single representation, and that's where we get our three dimensional images. It's our brain taking that information and combining it to say, here's how I'm making sense of the world around us. But stuff like traditional photographs or drawings, or films and television present two dimensional images to us. Their images on flat surfaces, and thus they have no depth. Our brains can try to judge depth based upon the qualities within the image, as in I can tell that in this image, this one thing is closer than this other thing. But that also means our brains can be fooled if we take advantage of that way that brains work. This is the principle behind tricks like forced perspective, in which you position subjects in an image in such a way as to create the illusion of a significant difference in size. But it's not necessarily the case that one object or person is significantly larger or smaller than another. Rather, it has to do with the distance to the camera and the angle of the shot. So an example of this trick in action is found throughout the Lord of the Rings films, in which Ian McKellen, who played Gandalf, would often be positioned so that he was closer to the camera than the actors who were playing dwarves or hobbits, you know, the smaller creatures. The crew created special tables and benches and other pieces of furniture so that when they were shot from the correct camera angle, it looked like a normal table, and this supported the illusion that you were looking in on, say a six foot tall human like figure sitting down with three foot tall human like figures, when in reality the differences in the actor's heights was really much less dramatic. This trick works because there's no true depths in the image we're looking at, so the filmmakers can take advantage of that and create this illusion. A three D version makes this trick harder to pull off, since it requires shooting the scene from two different angles to simulate the experience of a person looking in on that scene with their own eyeballs, and so forced perspective in three D films is a lot harder to pull off. So that's the first part of three D technology. You shoot a scene with two cameras position such that they mimic how the viewer's eyes would look in on that scene, or sometimes this is done in a computer generated environment for example pre c g I films or for converted films. Will talk more about those in the second. But now you have two sets of images to show an audience right, You have one set for the left camera and one set for the right camera, and you will only want one set of images to go to each eye. Right, the images from the left camera have to go to the viewers left eye. The images from the right camera have to go to the viewer's right eye. But you're showing all of them on the same surface. Otherwise this the three D effect won't work. You would just have a mess of images on the screen. It would be a big jumble. So how do you tell the light which way to go? How do you tell the light from the left side just go to the left eye and the light from the right side to just go to the right eye for an audience full of people. Well back when three D films were first really becoming a fad in the nineteen fifties, it was typical to use filters on the camera's color filters. The left camera would have say a red lens filter on it, and that meant only red light could come through that filter. This is a matter of physics. A red object is one that absorbs all light except light that has wavelengths in the red spectrum. That light would reflect off the object. A red lens allows red light to pass through and absorbs all other light. Similarly, the right camera lens would have a blue filter on it, which meant only the blue light from a scene could pass through. So now you have two rolls of film of the same movie. They are shot from almost identical angles, but they are slightly offset, again to mimic the way our eyes are offset. One set of those images is from the camera with the red filter, and the other is from the camera with the blue filter. You take these developed pieces of film, you put them in a pair of projectors, also spaced just so, side by side, and you play them in sync with each other so that the sequence of images matches up. You have a red set and a blue set. So these are identical except for a slight difference in angle and of course their color. The audience puts on glasses that have red and blue lenses. The red lens will only let the images from the red filter camera pass through. The blue lenses on the glasses will only allow the blue images to pass through, and thus the brain gets two sets of images. If the cameras and projectors are properly aligned, this should create the illusion of a three dimensional image, and the audience will perceive depth and what is otherwise two sets of two dimensional pictures, which is pretty darn cool. Of course, that's the old way to do it, and it meant that you couldn't really get a full color film in three D. But there are other ways to get the same effect. The two main ways fall into the broad category of passive glasses and active glasses. Passive glasses work in a similar way to the red blue lens glasses, in fact, the same way, just through a different operating mechanism. They typically use polarized lenses, which will only allow light that is polarized in a certain way to come through the lens. Polarized sunglasses work in this way. Most polarized sunglasses will only allow light that is vertically oriented to pass through the lens, because horizontally oriented light is typically glare caused by light that's reflecting off of horizontal surfaces like the hood of a car. So by blocking that kind of light, the glasses eliminate glare. It also means that less light is coming to your eyes more than a second. So you can polarize light and lots of different ways, not just horizontally and vertically, including in circular patterns that are clockwise or counterclockwise or witter shens as I like to say. A clockwise polarized lens won't let light with a counter clockwise polarization through the same lens, and vice versa. The clockwise approach is important, by the way, because if you polarize lights so that's say, the left lens only allows horizontal oriented light to come through and the right lens only allows vertical oriented light to come through, it would require the audience to sit upright to watch the image to get the proper feeling, the proper effect. That might work at a movie theater, but at home it could be an issue for people who might say, lounge a bit while watching television. So if your head is at an odd angle to the screen, the lenses might not align properly with the light coming from the image, and thus the circular polarization helps bypass that particular problem. Otherwise, the process is pretty much the same as the red and blue version. Each camera has a special filter to only allow light polarized in a particular way to pass through the lens, or the projectors are fitted with special filters to polarize the light that they're projecting. These match the glasses, and we again get the two sets of images that, when viewed through this pair of glasses with the proper polarization, creates that illusion of a three dimensional image. Then we have active glasses. These are glasses that have liquid crystals in the lenses, and the liquid crystals can change shape and a fraction of a second, so in one orientation they block light from coming through the lens, and the other orientation they allow light to pass through the lens. They're kind of like very tiny window blinds that open and shut at an incredible speed. And the left lens and the right lens have crystals alternating these two orientations, so that when the left lens is letting light through and the right isn't, then you can get the left side, and then vice versa. The right side will let light through on the left, won't you get the right side. The shuttering is in synchronization with the film or the three D television, Otherwise that method wouldn't work, So you're only getting the left images when those are on display, You're only getting the right images when those are on display, and otherwise the the opposite lens is blocking light. So with these glasses, rather than having two sets of the same image projected on a movie screen simultaneously or on a television display, you only have one set displayed at any given instant. So let's say it's the first fraction of a second, only the image for the left eye is on display. The glasses worn by the audience open the shutters on the left lens and close the shutters on the right lens, so that the light only gets to the left eye of all the viewers. In the next instant, the image for the right eye is displayed and the glasses switch the shutters, so now the light can pass through the right lens but not the left. And this goes on, with the glasses shuttering over and over in sequence with the images on the screen, and it's all happening fast enough that our brains can't detect the changes. To us, it just seems like a continuous series of images coming right into our brains, like we're looking in unbroken sequence with both eyes at the same time, and our brains again construct this three dimensional representation. This approach helps correct a problem that a lot of other three D films have, which is that they tend to be pretty dark. You've got two sets of images on the same surface with the other methods of three D presentation. So if you read a lot of tech blogs or a lot of movie review sites that talk about the differences between three D versions of a film and the two D versions of the film, you'll often see commentary about how dark the three D version is in comparison, and that has a couple of things with it. That's partly because you have projectors with these polarized filters on them, so less light is coming from the projector to hit the screen. You're wearing glasses that also have polar rized lenses on them, so they're preventing some of the light from the screen to getting to your eyes. So that means the image is going to look darker to you, and it can make it challenging or even impossible to tell what's going on with a dimly lit scene. There's some filmmakers who try to counteract this by using, you know, actual effects in the making of a three D film to make a very bright image in the first place and avoid doing darker image stuff. But you can also get around this by actually just boosting the amount of light that the projectors is putting through the lens. You can essentially turn up the brightness on the projectors. That requires training a projectionist to be able to do this sort of thing, to calibrate a projector so that it is ideally working with the three D content, and a lot of places just don't do that. So there are a lot of projectionists who just they don't have the training to tweak things and make it calibrated so that you get a really good, uh, three D experience, And so the result is you get this kind of dark, muddy, out of focus almost experience. It's not ideal anyway. Uh. You you realize that there's not really a one size fits all approach to projecting films properly. You need to have that kind of training to really get the most out of it, and it's just just a fact that not a lot of places do that. Active glasses, however, which again don't have quite the same problems. They are the most technically complicated version of three D televisions and three D films, and it also means that the glasses themselves have to draw power from something which is typically a chargeable battery, and that means if you want to watch a three D film or TV show with active three D glasses, you need to make sure that those glasses are charged up first, or they may not work, they might conk out before the movie is over. And it also means they tend to be more expensive. So if you lose a pair of polarized glasses, that's already pretty expensive, but losing a pair of active three D glasses can really set you back a bit. When we come back, i'll talk about why the industry pushed hard for three D televisions and three D content and three D films, But first, let's take a quick break. Okay, I gave you a quick rundown on how three D works, and I could trace the history of three D back to early stereoscopic photographs up through the gimmicky tricks of the nineteen fifties designed to lure more crowds into movie theaters because of a fear that television was going to rob theaters of their audiences. But honestly, I've covered that in other episodes. And it's not really that relevant to this conversation about modern tell visions and the effort to get three D adopted as a standard feature in TVs. So what gives Well, First, it helps if we look at the rebirth of three D at the cinema. Now, apart from some fairly gimmicky films like Jaws three D, the three D craze had proven to be just sort of a fad from a bygone eram But that started to change in the first decade of the two thousand's, particularly with a film that came out in two thousand nine. So you do have filmmakers who are interested in using three D to enhance the experience they want their audiences to have while they are watching one of these directors films, and these filmmakers are exploring new ways to create movies and to tell stories. A great example of such a filmmaker is James Cameron, and in fact, his insanely successful two thousand nine film Avatar is a large reason why three D films took off. Shortly afterwards, Avatar smashed box office records and the effects were rightly louded by critics. People said the three D effects of this movie are like nothing we've ever seen before. It's not really an exaggeration to say that Avatar helped usher in the modern three D cinema age. A three D film requires different considerations than a standard two dimensional film, which can hide a lot of stuff just through lighting and camera angles and other simple tricks. A three D film requires a slightly different approach, often using the same tricks but tweaked for the three D filming process. It also requires twice as many people. You've got two cameras to run, not just one, so you have two camera crews. You've got a much larger staff. It's more expensive, and because it's more technically complicated, when things go wrong, it can take a lot more time to fix stuff. So it's not necessarily a better approach, but it is a different approach. Stuff like force perspective is a lot harder to pull off that way. It just means that you have to go about things in a different way if you want to get the most out of creating a three D film versus a two D film. Other films get converted into three D after they've already been shot in two D, so these movies were not shot in three D natively. So with this approach, you're taking a single two dimensional set of images. You know, that's what a film is. It's just a long sequence of two dimensional images. Then you have to take that and turn it into two offset series of images, one for each eye. Now this can be done, it could even be done well, but it's also really easy to do it poorly, and in any case, it can result in a movie that seems to be shot in three D for no apparent reason, like there's no thing in the film that benefits from the three D ness. With movies, a big motivating factor for studios and movie theater chains is that they can charge more money for a three D screening of a film. It's a premium experience. So if it's done well, it can be a really great experience for the audience. They can feel like it was worth the money. But whether it's done well or not, it drives up ticket prices. You can charge more for those tickets, and driving a ticket prices is a good way to generate a lot more revenue, particularly in the early stages of a film's release, and that means you can turn up the hype machine, because if your film breaks some box office records. You can use that to try and get more folks who haven't yet seen the film in theaters to come check it out. And you don't necessarily need to sell more tickets than the previous record holder if the tickets you're selling are more expensive. So, in other words, let's say you are selling cookies at fifty cents each and I swoop in on your turf and I start selling cookies for a dollar each. But I also say that my cookies have some feature about them that makes them superior. Let's say I'm using the claim that the ingredients in my cookie are all natural, for example, then I can make more money than you, even if you sell more cookies than I do. If you sell five dozen cookies at fifty cents each, well you netted yourself thirty bucks, which isn't bad. Now, let's say I sold four dozen cookies, so twelve cookies fewer than you did, but I charge a dollar each, so I met myself forty eight bucks. You sold more cookies, but I brought in more revenue. Three D films can help studios and theaters achieved the same thing. If we were just looking at the number of tickets sold. The story would be different. So there's a strong business case for three D content in movie theaters, particularly in an age where the average person is going to the cinema less frequently. Since two thousand one, the per capita tickets sales in the United States has been on a fairly steady decline, with a couple of bumps every other year or so. One way to combat this is to offer up an experience that is hard to replicate at home, a high fidelity experience with booming surround sound, crisp images, and occasionally three D effects that can help convert someone from I'll just watch it when it's available for streaming to let's go to the theater and check this out. Another motivation for three D films on the studio side is that they seemed like a good solution to a problem of debatable magnitude. That is the problem of movie piracy and bootlegging. Now, I've done episodes in which I've talked about movie piracy in the past, but let's do a quick overview. First. Piracy isn't cool, guys, that's just you know, true. My philosophy is that if you think something is worth the price, then you should pay that price in order to experience whatever that thing is. If you think something is not worth the price, if you think they're charging way too much for that, then you don't pay the price and you don't experience it. That's how you can get the prices to come down. You just say like, well, I just don't think it's worth it, so I'm not gonna bother if it was. If you feel like it wasn't worth it, why would you worry about it? Now? If you think it's worth the price, but you're not willing to pay that price. So in other words, you're just saying, it's probably worth the twenty bucks to see it, but I'm not gonna pay twenty bucks to see it. I'm just gonna steal it. Well, that that makes you a jerk. That's that's all that works out. So pirating isn't really cool. Now that being said, the movie studios have a narrative around piracy that isn't really supportable. So well, I agree that piracy is not good. I also say that movie studios have blown it way out of proportion. See, the narrative is that movie piracy directly translates to lost revenue, and that's just not really supportable. If someone bootlegs a copy of a movie and then makes it available in people who otherwise would never go see the movie download the film to watch it. You can't really claim that the movie studio is out any revenue. After all, those pirates were never going to pay to see the movie at all, So, in other words, there's no difference to the movie studios bottom line if those people pirated the film or they didn't, because they were never going to buy a ticket in the first place. Either they were going to pirate the film and watch it for free, or they weren't going to pirate the film and not watch it at all. Either way, you don't get a ticket sale. Now, some of those people might have been willing to buy a ticket before they got hold of a pirated copy. Those people could potentially represent cases of lost revenue, but it's impossible to determine how many of those pirates would have otherwise bought a ticket, which means it's impossible for movie studios to give an actual amount as to the magnitude of lost revenue. And since movies studios used these very large estimates to justify lobbying for stiff penalties whenever they pursued cases, against pirates. They were able to win some pretty draconian victories against people using pretty flimsy justification. This was all in an effort to terrify would be pirates in order to discourage the practice. At the same time, the goal was to find ways to coax people into movie theaters, something that the theater chains also wanted to have happened for obvious reasons. And finding ways to create an experience that's not really easy to replicate at home was part of this strategy. With the success of Avatar, three D films became a big part of that strategy. It was hard to bootleg a three D film, so the super jen Kie way where you set up a camera inside a movie theater just didn't work. You know, the image would be even worse than a typical bootleg made in that way. And if you could get your hands on a digital copy, something that has happened on numerous occasions with different films, the image would be better, but you would still need a compatible three D television and glasses set up, or you wouldn't actually be able to watch the content in three D. And of course you could potentially get hold of a two D version of the movie, but then one of the big selling points of the film wouldn't be available to you. So three D was seen as a way to convince people to go to a theater to see a movie, rather than to pirate it or wait around. And this trend found its way to television manufacturers who saw the potential to advertise to home theater enthusiasts who did want to get the closest approximation of the cinematic experience in their own home setups. See One of the reasons three D televisions became a thing is that TV companies need to create a compelling reason for people to go out and buy a television. This is an arc we can follow whenever a new television technology really takes off. Initially, only a small percentage of the market adopts it, typically because the tech tends to be pretty expensive when it first debuts and there may be a shortage of content that you can watch on this new tech of television. So, for example, we saw this with the invention of color TV in the nineteen fifties. Color TV actually followed not long after black and white television first started to get a real foothold. After the end of World War two, our c A and CBS competed fiercely to create the standard for color television. Eventually, our c A pretty much won that battle after some initial setbacks, but I covered that in my r c A episodes. But even though the tech was there, widespread adoption did not fall immediately. In fact, it took quite some time. So for one thing, only a few programs were being broadcast in color. In fact, for a long time in BC was the only network broadcasting anything in color, so a color television only had a slight advantage over older black and white sets. Why would you buy a color TV if there are only a couple of programs that are in color. Studios pushed hard to expand the options, with companies like Disney doing a lot to promote the advancement of color television. But price was another barrier. Television's were and are expensive. Many households don't have the extra money laying around to upgrade to the latest update to technologies like television's. The expectation was that you would buy a television set and then you pretty much use it until it stopped working, or maybe until the cost of repairing a television is more or less the same as buying a new one in the first place. For reasons like these, color television actually took a really long time to get a purchase in the US market, even by fewer than fifty of all households with a television had a color set. Similarly, we saw a trend like this emerge with high definition television. The transition from standard definition TV to h D t V was a fairly gradual one, and largely for the same reasons as the color TV transition we had seen in the sixties and seventies, though it took less time with HDTV, and we're seeing similarities with ultra high definition television sets to have two K or greater resolution. On top of that, you have other features like h D R and more. These aren't just tech advancements. These are sales pitches to get people to buy more televisions, because that's how businesses work. So for several years, companies like Sony, LG, Samsung, and many others really pushed three D capabilities. When we come back, i'll talk about how that played out, but first let's take another quick break. Companies were starting to experiment with three D television tech before, but that's the year of the industry really began to commit to the technology. Again, not coincidentally, because of Avatar's success, all the major TV manufacturers were pretty much on board. Most of them adopted the passive glasses strategy, a few were gambling with active glasses instead. A very few examples played with the idea of glasses free three D television demand. That's a big gamble. So with those sets, the screen itself acts in a way that's similar to a pair of three D glasses directing lights so that each of your eyeballs gets a different feed of information, as it were, But it also means to experience that three D effect, you need to be viewing the television from the proper angle. So you can imagine the TV surface and imagine that there's a wedge shape expanding out from the TV surface, and then imagine within that wedge you have slices kind of like a pizza or a pie. If you're in one of those slices, like in the middle, you get the three D effect. But if you're outside the wedge by being a little too far off to one side or the other, or if you are in a position where you're astride two slices like the slice goes down the middle where you're sitting or standing, you don't get the proper three D effect and it becomes hard to look at the screen anyway. The three D tech and television's worked more or less depending upon the specific implementation, but that's just part of the puzzle that needs to come together to make an innovation in TV technology a success. Yes, it has to work for it to be a success, but that's not the only quality. It has to have. Another is content, just like with color television and high definition television and now ultra high definition content. Without good three D content, this feature was doomed. Early on a few different media companies experimented with creating three D channels, and they included big names like ESPN. The provider Direct TV also had a three D channel, but both of them would stop broadcasting by two thousand thirteen. I'll get back to that in a second. The point is it's hard to sell a public on a platform if there's nothing on that platform. Fans of video game consoles have seen this happen time and time again. Arguably it's what doomed the Nintendo. We you there just wasn't enough compelling content available for the console. Another source of content was the promise of three D Blu ray discs, but to play one of these you needed a compatible Blu ray player, So if you had an old Blu ray player that was not compatible with three D technology, you would have to go out and buy a new one. You wouldn't just be investing in a brand new television, but also a brand new Blu ray player. Some companies were able to patch existing equipment to support three D content. Sony did this with the PlayStation three, and firmware updates to players could help remove some of the barriers to entry, but it wasn't a universal practice, and it didn't always mean that the experience you got was as good as if you went out and bought a new Blu ray player that could support it. Natively, so it was a fix for some platforms, but not an ideal one. On top of all that, there was the problem of three D quality in general. Now I'm not talking about how the television is displayed three D, although if you didn't tweak the settings just right you would have a pretty shoddy experience in the home. I am actually talking about the quality of the content itself. The floodgates opened after Avatar's crazy success, and so there were the movies that had been shot in three D to begin with, which weren't guaranteed to be better, but had advantages over the other type of three D content, the aforementioned converted to D films that have been turned into three D. Many movies included gimmicks of stuff seeming to emerge out from the screen. That's a three D trick that's been around since the nineteen fifties, and rather than create an immersive experience, these tricks seemed to call too much attention to themselves. It actually tends to pull people out of the movie. You you're laughing at something that's happening, because it's so far outside the realm of a typical movie experience that pulls you out of it. There are several analysts and television manufacturing representatives who actually blame the poorer performance of three D television sales on the ratio of bad three D content to good stuff. In other words, there was just too much crappy three D out there, and there wasn't enough good to really make it compelling. Then, of course you have to buy or rent the blu ray discs that you would play on your compatible Blu Ray player, and then adds yet another expense to this technology. And if the television comes with fewer sets of three D glasses, then you have people in your household, then you have to shell out even more money to make sure everyone has a glasses set. And complicating matters was that the Blu Ray format itself was starting to struggle in the market at this same time. While the quality of Blu Ray films, both from a picture and sound standpoint, was superior to most other home entertainment options, it wasn't nearly as convenient as emerging cloud based streaming services like Netflix, Amazon's prime video service, Hulu, and things like that. Consumers were favoring convenience over image and sound quality, which has been a pretty steady trend throughout media history see also the music industry. By two thousand nineteen, there were really only two services to stream three D movies, at least legally. Those were Voodoo and the PlayStation Video Service. You couldn't get three D streaming on the more popular mainstream services out there, and this contributed to the lackluster usage data around three D televisions. On top of that, people were watching less content on their television's in general, and watching more stuff like that on tablets and smartphones. The shift in consumer behavior had no real place in it for three D television. The glasses themselves also represented a challenge. Many customers didn't like the idea of having to put on a pair of glasses just to watch a movie in their own homes and admit having to keep track of yet another peripheral on top of mundane stuff like remote controls. Plus, if you damaged or lost a pair, it wasn't a pretty big expense to replace them, usually in the range of a hundred dollars per pair of glasses. So the general consensus was that three D glasses are expensive and a hassle. Plus, some people found that the glasses would be uncomfortable, and they could contribute to problems like eye strain or headaches and generally create an unpleasant experience. Lots of folks have issues like this with three D films as well, so this isn't just something that happens to people watching three D television. There are people who have generally unpleasant experiences watching three D films. I tend to fall into that camp. Actually, if a film is showing in three D and two D, I almost always pick the two D version. I will see a three D film if I feel like it was made specifically with the intent to be a three D film, at least in some cases, but those are rare exceptions because I do tend to find the experience to be unpleasant. Three D TV sales never quite matched the marketing efforts that these companies were putting forward. The numbers did go up, though that may largely be because many models sold in the first few years following two had three D capability baked into them, so you could argue that people were buying these sets not because they were three D capable, but rather they were in the market for a brand new television, and all the brand new televisions also had three D support built into them. Even if people were buying them because of the three D capability, before long it became clear that most folks just weren't using that feature. So you had a lot of people holding back from buying a three D television, perhaps because of the price or just in general sense that they wouldn't get much out of it. And then you had the people who would buy the three D TVs, but they never or very rarely ever watched three D content on them. The House of cards really came down, tumbling down pretty quickly. It wasn't a complete shambles until about two thousand and seventeen. Now I already mentioned that three D channels like ESPN's special three D cable channel went off the air. By that was an early warning sign. The expense and technical challenges of producing good three D content were just too high. Companies were not seeing a good return on investment. If the money had been there, then those channels would have stuck around, but it just wasn't there. The manufacturers began to abandon three D features to video pulled the plug early, and which was a pretty prescient move, as it turns out. Sam Sung would hold on until two thousand and sixteen and then stopped including three D support in their television's. L G and Sony were the last two major television manufacturing companies to offer three D support. They stopped in two thousand seventeen. On the film front, three D screenings have not been doing very well in the United States over the last few years. In the wake of Avatar, three D screenings began to make up a pretty good part of the overall revenue for ticket sales, but the glood of two D films converted to three D, the horror viewing experiences, that kind of stuff may have contributed to a general feeling of disillusionment over the quality of three D movies. Or maybe it's the premium prices that audiences object to. Whatever the reason, three D ticket sales at the US have been on the decline for several years. Then again, this is complicated by the fact that ticket sales in general have been on the decline, So it's possible the trend with three D films is merely keeping pace with the overall trend for movie ticket sales. But there's no shortage of articles out there that suggests that audiences in North America see very little added value with three D films in general and have come to reject them when going to the theater. In one place this isn't happening, however, is China. China has the most theaters capable of screening three D films in the entire world, and China represents a truly huge market for entertainment. It's such a big market that its shape. It's the actual content of films. So, for example, in two thousand twelve, the remake of Red Dawn debuted. The original film had come out in nine four, and it had been shelved for a couple of years that had actually been finished by but MGM, the production company that was behind it, got into some real financial difficulty, so the movie kind of set on shells for a couple of years. A different studio came in to become the production company, and at that stage they were looking at editing the movie and making a major change changing the invading army from Chinese soldiers to North Korean soldiers. The film it's China in two twelve, it's North Korea. So why is that, Well, it's because of the huge potential market in China. It was a political move. It was done to avoid ticking off a potentially lucrative market. They would never be able to sell the film in China if China are seen as the enemy in the movie. But then the movie never did release in China, so it's kind of a moot point. What I'm getting at is that the Chinese market is so huge, so significant to the entertainment industry that when movie studios are considering funding a film production. That's part of the consideration. So movies that are made for North America are often made for North America. And then you have an asterisk next to that that says and also China, but mostly China, so you might end up having a very different film than what perhaps the screenwriter or director originally intended. Anyway, that Chinese market is likely to keep the three D film industry alive because it is a fairly popular form of entertainment over in China. It may mean that we'll see more conversions, more two D to three D film conversions rather than native three D films, because again, unless it's a c g I film, it tends to require twice as much of a crew to run a three D shoot as a normal two D shoot, so it's a very expensive and complicated endeavor. So is three D dead in the United States? I would say it's mostly dead, But we do have the sequels to Avatar coming out that might have a bit of a at least a brief franchise specific revival, and we'll probably see three D come back and yet another incarnation in the future because it has happened before. But I think in general we're going to see fewer three D films, at least fewer films made in three D from the get go, and we probably will see a continuation of the trend of fewer people buying tickets to go see the three D films. But that's just my own opinion on that matter. This was really to trace how the fad failed to become a trend. Thank you so much for listening to text Stuff. I promise we'll have new episodes up very soon. Uh, just having an off day, really, it's nothing serious, but yeah, totally side checked me. So we will have some news shows up very soon. If you have suggestions for topics we should cover in episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.