Sky talks up subscription 3D merits

Instead of..

..all this 2D screen / 3D glasses stuff why don't they just provide a a complete in-room holographic system ?

Sky ?

Don't talk to me about Sky ! (to paraphrase Marvin).

A colleague was due to get Sky installed. She waited in her house all day on the appointed day. No one appeared. She nipped out for 5 minutes and returned to find a message from the installer. Phoned him back - apparently he''d been waiting in the street in her town for about an hour.

As she lives on a farm up a lane with no adjoining houses and 2 miles from the nearest town she found this quite amazing - but "he wouldn't discuss this". So she has no idea where he was and as she'd previously had a phonecall from an installer in Wales asking where her house was it could have been anywhere in the UK.

Anyway, would you trust a supplier who is so technologically challenged that it cannot use a GPS or get addresses correct to supply any advanced viewing system ?

It'll need to be.

I wonder what the content will be, is there really much "3D" content? I guess that's coming, but right now?

I also wonder what the effect of watching "3D" content for many hours will be. Now I know the world is "3D" but the world isn't "fixed focus", the unnatural part of watching "3D" content is that the viewer must fix their focus on the display, even though much of what they are viewing suggests otherwise. Additionally "fuzzy focus" in the scene (like when you look over someone's shoulder at the part of the scene the director wants you to look at) is really confusing for the brain (the foreground "fuzzy" part of the scene cannot be brought into focus). I imagine if the viewer watched large amounts of it they'd suffer headaches. While it might seem quite natural, it really isn't.

I also think Sky are going to find it hard to tempt people into paying EVEN MORE. If HD was a hard sell, this is going to be really difficult.

@ James 5

RE the in-room holographic system. Does anyone remember "Wild Palms"?

Waste of time and money

3D TV will never go anywhere unless it's a precursor to holographic systems.

The general public has only just started getting HD TV's but haven't seen the value in them yet as there isn't enough HD delivery unless you subscribe, either that or you kick yourself for buying a HD TV when you have to go out and buy another so that you can receive freesat HD.

Surely they should have looked at the whole Blu-ray issue, the tech and discs aren't exactly flying off the shelves.

Well..

I saw Up in 3D at the cinema and it was miles better than any 3D I'd seen before... I was expecting to be uncomfortable and get a headache but I actually forgot I was wearing them after a while and became completely engrossed in the experience.

3D is a waste of time for years yet

Some day a TV will arrive which does not require glasses (or impose other stupid viewing requirements), does not cost the earth, does not induce eyestrain or pounding headaches and which implements the appropriate industry standards so that it will be compatible with all range of input devices.

But that day is not here. It's not even clear when it will arrive. And even if it did, there isn't much content to show on such a device.

3D is clearly many years from mainstream adoption, which in turn should tell you what you're going to get if you subscribe to a Sky 3D service - the shaft. Sky still charges too much for HD and that's supposedly mainstream these days.

Murdoch's Law

@ James 5 - your friend left the house, and that was the moment the installer chose to turn up. That's known as Sod's Law, and it's hardly under the control of Sky. Rupert Murdoch may be a sod (probably the nicest thing he's been called in a good few years), but it's not his own personal law.

Also, @ andy gibson - wow, someone else actually remembers Wild Palms! Every time I mention it to a friend, they always look at me as if I dreamt it. You're not any relation to William Gibson, are you? I figured maybe you were only watching it to catch your brother's cameo.