One of the big trends at this year’s 3D Entertainment Summit was 3D content distribution via the Internet. Now that new 3D hardware is being regularly announced, the next wave of opportunity is acquiring content and building online hubs and portals. Revenue models include pay per download, advertising, or just existing to strengthen support for the 3D hardware they sell.
At the conference, Nvidia was first at bat with 3D Vision Live. Starting with online movie samples, trailers, and shorts, their goal is to eventually turn this into an online YouTube-like service for Nvidia 3D Vision users to upload and share content. It turns out that YouTube 3D is not a viable solution for them just yet because of compatibility limitations with Flash and windowed 3D viewing with 3D Vision. Their recent agreements with Microsoft’s Silverlight got around this problem, and made this service possible.
In contrast, Spatial View is chasing down 3D content markets for both PC and mobile. Their yet to be released service called 3DeeCentral is a similar concept to that of Nvidia’s.
While 3DeeCentral was still in beta during the presentation, their portal will support multiple 3D formats. In fact,their demo was being done with Nvidia 3D Vision glasses!
They also demonstrated a slide-on lenticular sheet for iPods for added auto-stereoscopic 3D capabilities. We tried to get a 3D picture of what it really looks like, but it didn’t work out.
Last but not least, credit should go to Dynamic Digital Depth’s Yabazam! service which we didn’t see at the show. However, their system lets users download and view movies to their Tridef media player. While not publicized, we found that this player also works with Nvidia’s GeForce 3D Vision system and several other formats.