Hidden away in the depths of the European Commission’s latest household communications survey is a finding that should scare the 4X out of the cable industry: the percentage of EU27 households using cable TV fell by 4% between 2008 and 2009, from 34% to 30%. To put this in context, that means the cable industry lost around 8 million TV household customers in the space of just 12 months. The biggest winner has been digital terrestrial television. The share of households using digital terrestrial rose from 12% to 23%, while the proportion of those using analogue terrestrial fell from 41% to 34%. Satellite also made gains, increasing by 2% to reach 24% of households, and IPTV rose from 2% to 4%. Observant readers will have noted that we have reached a total of 115% of households. The survey allowed for multiple answers because some hosueholds use a combination of different TV access services, usually because they have terrestrial TV (analogue or digital) for one TV set, with cable or satellite piped to another. Cable’s decline has been little short of dramatic in Benelux. For years, visitors to those countries were told that the “only” way to receive television was through a cable network. Even though cable TV penetration strictly speaking never reached the 100% mark, it was certainly in the 90%+ range for many years. Now, according to the viewers themselves at least, cable is used by only 69% of Belgian households, a decline of 18% in one year. This was mirrored precisely by the increase in digital terrestrial usage over the same period. In the Netherlands, cable usage fell to 75% of homes, with digital terrestrial at 21% by the end of 2009. This is not the “cord cutting” which American cable operators are currently fretting over. Stateside, the hot issue is whether cable (and satellite) customers will switch to internet-delivered, OTT TV. In Europe, the threat from digital terrestrial television is currently much greater and already having a marked impact. Where cable used to provide the de facto option for “free”, commercially funded TV channels, it is losing ground rapidly to over-the-air services. The latter, of course, are genuinely free of charge (except for public service TV licence fees in some cases), in contrast to the “basic” fees cable operators have always charged. Here is yet another indication of the huge structural differences between the US and European markets, which strike me every time I travel between the two regions. A couple of days ago, during a meeting with a well-known US software provider looking to enter the European connected TV market, I saw another sign of how US companies can struggle to appreciate these variations when they visit Europe. It may have been more or less abandoned in the US, but free-to-air television in Europe is alive and well. Client Reading: Global Digital Television Forecast: 1H'10

The excitement around 3D has been palpable over the past year, beginning with the numerous announcements, roll outs and demos at CES.  The momentum continued through the spring and summer, with more service providers putting stakes in the ground, and carried over to this year’s IBC show, where Strategy Analytics hosted an analyst breakfast on the topic with Sky 3D head, Brian Lenz.  The verdict? Excitement and hype levels were skyrocketing.  The question remains, though, whether or not anyone can spin this into a viable and profitable consumer offering. Over the summer, we fielded a 4,800 respondent survey  in five countries (France, Germany, Italy, UK and US), asking individuals about their understanding of, interest in, and willingness to pay for 3DTV.  The results are covered in detail in report we just published last week.  Here are some highlights:

Translating 3D Excitement into 3DTV Viability is Challenge

Over 70% of those who have seen 3D in the movie theater are impressed by its quality, but only 55% of those same individuals say they’re interested in watching 3DTV at home. How can Service Providers translate the cinematic excitement around 3D into a viable residential business? We found a few barriers standing in the way, including a dearth of content in 3D, luke-warm consumer interest in paying, hardware issues (the need to wear glasses), and widespread market uncertainty.

Market Uncertainty is a Barrier

Respondents were asked a battery of questions around their perceptions of 3DTV, including availability, hardware requirements and potential health and safety issues.  While overall awareness is quite high, with 94% saying they believe it’s possible to see 3D films in a movie theater, on other questions, the market uncertainty is substantial. The most surprising, and most critical finding to both vendors and service providers alike, is the uncertainty surrounding perceived health risks. Overall, 70% of respondents said they were either unsure or believed that watching 3DTV causes damage to the eyes. We believe that this perception issue, which proved to be common across the five countries surveyed, is a key hurdle standing in the way of widespread adoption of 3DTV. Regardless of the validity of the belief, customer perception is what matters, and such widespread uncertainty could prove disastrous if not addressed appropriately.

Perceived Health Risk by Country (“3DTV Causes Eye Damage”) N=4,803

Source: Strategy Analytics

Target: Cube Tubers

3DTV, at least in the short term,  will be largely a niche application, attractive to only a subset of the general population. Through our survey work, we have isolated and identified this demographic as the “Cube Tubers,” and suggest that they should be viewed as a key target market for service providers and equipment vendors. These individuals represent between 8%-10% of the overall population, and are unique in their intentions to purchase a 3DTV in the upcoming year, and to be active premium/HD customers.  Cube Tubers,  who are predominantly young, educated married males, are nearly twice as likely as the average Joe to expect to pay for 3DTV.  Willingness or expectation of paying hits on an issue that many in the industry seem to be overlooking.  Few question the “wow” factor of 3D.  Rather, the question is, how do you make money at it? Client Reading: 3DTV: Will Consumers Buy It?

I was speaking on the panel at the OTT 'mashup' eventat Ogilvy's London Docklands headquarters last night, alongside Turner Broadcasting's Casey Harwood and Anthony Rose, CTO at the BBC's Canvas (now YouView) project, amongst others. As a first-time masher-up and intrigued at the possibilities for the format, the event turned out to be organised along relatively familiar panel debate lines. Casey and I began with introductory comments, and were followed by critiques from the other contributors. The session was then opened up to debate, including audience questions. All the time, running on a display behind us, was a Twitter feed of comments from participants in the twittersphere, as well, presumably, as a few of the 100 or so people who joined us in the traditional, physical fashion. The only problem was that the panelists had to turn away from the audience to see if any particularly fascinating Tweets had appeared, and if they ever did, it was noticeable that the physical audience's attention would be diverted to the ominous gap between the panelists and away from the speakers. The one recommendation I would make is that questions and comments from the virtual audience could have been added to the debate; it did rather feel at times as though we were being Tweeted at without right of reply. Nevertheless it was an interesting evening and I hope the audience found the debate valuable. my own contribution centered on a few relevant datapoints from our recent survey of UK TV and online TV viewers. In particular I referenced the fact that 13% of UK people are currently watching TV on the internet at least on a weekly basis. So we needed to bear in mind that the OTT phenomenon is still restricted to a relatively small proportion of the population, and most of that activity is taking place on the PC. The number of people accessing web TV on their TV set is of course even smaller: 6% of people are connecting a PC to a TV, and 4% now claim to use a dedicated internet TV device. Having said that, our work with early connected TV adopters within our Digital Home Observatory suggests that television behaviour can change rapidly once viewers have access to some of these emerging technologies. This segment is motivated by a desire for greater viewing flexibility and access to preferred content. They also still see weaknesses in current connected TV solutions, especially in the field of control devices and interfaces. The panel also touched on the issue of business models, and in response to the question of how things might look in three years I replied that the basic alternatives would not change greatly: television in the UK will still be funded by a combination of public service licence fees, advertising and customer payment of one sort or another. The mix may change slightly, and we may see greater variety in pay business models. But it’s important to remember that customers are very sensitive to their monthly bills. The impression is often given, especially by new entrants, that new payment models can somehow overcome consumer resistance to the size of the overall television bill. The reality is that 80% of UK customers check their bank statements every month, and a similar proportion prefer predictability in their monthly payments. 69% would agree to pay only for the shows they watch, but only if it reduced the overall monthly bill. All in all I agreed with Anthony Rose’s comment that too little emphasis in connected TV discussions has been put on live, scheduled television. The assumption seems to be that this traditional model will break down rapidly as various on-demand options become available, but this trend is likely to happen only slowly over a long period of time. Even for early adopters, scheduled broadcasting remains an important part of the overall mix. The overall message is one of increased fragmentation of delivery models and audiences. Client Reading: Profiling the Connected Media Consumer - UK

Cisco today unveiled its long-awaited consumer Telepresence product. A smaller and scaled-down version of the company’s enterprise-grade TelePresence system, “ūmi” (‘you-me’) comes with an HD camera, a console and a remote. The idea of the videophone is far from new. Children of the 60s and 70s may recall George Jetson getting chewed out by his boss, Mr. Spacely, over videochat. In fact, the technology, is older than that, and was conceptualized as early as the late 1800s. The German Bundespost offered (albeit short-lived) commercially-available service the1930’s. AT&T announced its Picturephone product at the 1964 World’s Fair, though the service never quite took off, reportedly maxing out at 500 subscribers nationwide.

This time it’s different…

What makes this time different? According to Cisco’s VP of Consumer Marketing, Ken Wirt, three things are different this time. The quality and ubiquity of HD displays, the increased average household bandwidth, and exponentially increasing processing power have converged to create a ‘perfect storm’ for telepresence.

With apologies to Elvis Costello

Writing about telepresence is like dancing about architecture

Or was that Frank Zappa? In any case, as with HD or 3D, trying to explain telepresence to someone who hasn’t seen it is akin to trying to explain the color blue to a blindfolded person. You kind of have to see it to understand it. I had a chance to test drive the product last week before the official product announcement, and must say that—even as a professional skeptic--I left the demo thoroughly impressed. The so-called “immersive” effect (allowing you to ‘see what others are feeling’ ) is quite noticeable, and is what distinguishes it from a garden-variety Skype video or web-based video chat program. There is near perfect synchronization between audio/video, and people appear life sized on the screen. Ken Wirt cited a study showing that 55% of all conversation is non-verbal. It’s no surprise that it is our body language, the nods and raised eyebrows, shaking heads, smiles and smirks, that distinguish a phone call from a ‘carbon-based’ face-to-face meeting.

The Uncomfortable Topic of Money

The price tag is steep, at $599 for the unit, plus a monthly fee of $24.99 for unlimited ūmi calls, video messaging and video storage. The system will be sold through Best Buy/Magnolia Home Theater stores, bestbuy.com and on the cisco website. The service requires a minimum of 3.5 Mbps to work in 1080p, though it can be optimized for use at lower speeds, as low as 1.5Mbps for 720p. This means that the service will largely be limited to those with cable broadband or FTTx. Cisco believes that 34% of US households have this type of upstream capability—which is in line with Strategy Analytics’ own estimates.

The Network Effect

Back in the early days, the phone company sold “telephone pairs,” with the understanding that the value of the network lies in the number of nodes. A telephone network with one phone is not terribly valuable. Nor is a telepresence unit if there’s nobody on the other end. Cisco has partially circumvented this problem by providing interoperability with Google video chat, though if you’re spending $600 on a unit, you probably want the “real thing.” The real value of telepresence will be realized when there is a robust network of equipped households. While family video-calling seems the most obvious use-case, its utility seems rather limited. How many times do we really want to videochat with Grandma each month? Unless and until the network reaches critical mass, the appeal and draw of video calling will be very limited. Rather than a consumer mass market play, the real opportunity might very well be in the Business to Consumer (B2C) space. If private industry can help subsidize and drive the technology more mainstream, it could hit the critical mass it needs. Cisco talked about a number of other potential applications, three sound like potential winners in driving telepresence forward. These include

Financial Services: A $600 upfront investment and $25/month is a drop in the bucket for a company trying to prove its value to high net worth clients. For the cost of a few steak dinners, a Financial Services company could equip a client’s living room and increase the frequency of “touch points.”

Health Care: While the chatter around Telemedicine never seems to cease, this is one application where it actually could make sense. An insurance company might find it financially beneficial to subsidize a unit for a patient requiring regular and routine examinations, or for medical compliance monitoring (“Did you take your pills Mrs. Smith?”)

Distance Learning: How about tapping into the multi-billion dollar distance learning market in the US.  Equip every “Phoenix” with a system? That’s what I call scale.

I want one… but not for $599 plus $24.99/month

Many who experience the technology firsthand will want one for their own living room. It’s cool. It works well, and the potential applications are only limited by the imagination. It’s light years ahead of pc-based chat. On the flipside, the price is high. Too high. And when you add on the 24.99/month fee, it starts to feel like another cable bill. Survey research conducted by Strategy Analytics in Q3’10 shows that 30% of Americans showed some interest in a service of this type. Importantly, though, 46% of those interested said they are often concerned about their ability to afford regular household bills, 45% said they worried about signing up to new fixed term contracts when buying new products and services.

Adoption Will be Slow But Steady

Cisco would certainly admit that the $599 price point is untenable for the long run, and as volumes slowly ramp up, we should expect to see price points come down. If Cisco is successful in getting private industry into the game, and a subsidy model takes hold, we could see adoption speed up. The other barrier standing in the way of rapid adoption is broadband. While today only one-third of households have the minimum required bandwidth to support the system, this will certainly increase going forward. We estimate that by 2015, over 60% of all US households will have at least 1.5 Mbps upstream capabilities. Stay tuned…we’ll be putting out a Telepresence report in the upcoming

Lack of ambition would presumably not be the most obvious failing of a new company which styles itself under the label “Everything Everywhere” (EE for sake of brevity). The name was chosen to represent the combined UK operations of both Orange (France Telecom) and T-Mobile (Deutsche Telekom), which now form a 50-50 joint venture and which announced their first results at an investors meeting in London yesterday. It would be a tad unfair, given the company’s core network technology assets, to assume that EE would be branching out into home pizza delivery any time soon, even though casual observers might assume “everything everywhere” might encompass all manner of exciting goods and services. Nevertheless, it was perhaps a little disappointing to discover from EE’s tagline – “Creating a new mobile champion” - that the network will apparently only serve network-based communications and applications to customers who happen to be moving around at any given time. Taglines are tough to get right, of course, and inevitably cannot please everyone. As the management presentations progressed, it became clear that mobility was not after all an absolute requirement for any future products and services which EE may choose to emphasise. Indeed, although they remain well hidden beneath the inevitable deluge of mobile phone and wireless network-centric commentary, fixed broadband and IPTV (for big screens) are very much alive and kicking as key elements in EE’s strategy. Executives even went as far as to designate IPTV as a “key part of a converged play” and that fixed broadband was “strategically hugely important”. This should come as a relief, perhaps even a surprise, given that fixed networks have played no part in T-Mobile’s UK business to date, and have been losing money (£80m in 2009) from the few customers Orange alone had managed to acquire. Given this performance the new venture might have been forgiven for abandoning fixed network businesses altogether as a lost cause. Instead we were assured that Orange’s broadband profitability was “already improving”, and that the recently announced deal to outsource network, IT and customer service to BT will have the desired impact of returning “Home” EBITDA to positive territory by 2012. Specifically EE will increase targeting of home broadband to its existing Orange mobile customers initially, and also introduce it to T-Home customers during 2011. Marketing will also encourage take-up of fixed voice by Orange and T-Home customers, since EE claims that the BT deal means that acquiring fixed voice customers would no longer have a negative margin impact on overall performance as was previously the case. The company is planning for 80% of new broadband customers to include fixed voice as part of their package. Potentially even more significant will be EE’s plans for IPTV, once they are finally confirmed. The company announced that it is looking at IPTV opportunities, including Canvas, the BBC-led over-the-top initiative. It would not join Canvas as a shareholder, but is considering affiliate membership. Whatever decision is eventually made on IPTV, EE will not become a major content player, which will come as a relief to shareholders and a disappointment to content rights holders looking for new competitors in the distribution market in order to boost values. EE even has the UK’s long-awaited fibre rollout on its radar. Its agreement with BT allows for access to the new fiber network by EE, although no specific plans have been agreed. Other emerging opportunities on EE’s radar include M2M (machine-to-machine), in which the company includes connected home devices and home automation as specific “high growth” verticals. M2M is a broad concept which may certainly one day lead to services and applications which approach “everything everywhere” capability. In the meantime, EE has probably has enough on its plate just to meet its growth and profitability targets in its core mobile and broadband businesses. Client Reading: Global Broadband Forecast 1H2010

Embarrassing Apology of the Week Award goes to Sky for the following email just received by its UK customers: “In our recent newsletter - 'This week on Sky Player' - we did not make it clear that in order to watch live Sky Sports for free on Sky Player until 31/12/2010, you need to subscribe to Sky Sports 1 & 2 on Sky TV. We apologise and hope that this did not cause too much confusion.” The company presumably has received complaints from confused customers who do not currently pay for Sky Sports on TV and assumed, naturally enough, that when Sky told them they could watch Sky Sports for free on Sky Player, they could watch Sky Sports for free on Sky Player. In fact, the email should clearly only have been sent to customers who already pay for Sky Sports on TV, or worded very differently for all customers. No doubt the company’s apology is also intended to ward off any possibility of a regulatory wrist-slap. It’s a little unfair, if rather easy on this occasion, to pick on Sky for its misleading communications over bundled service offers. But this episode does highlight the age-old question of when “free” really means “free”. My own father, who was fond of repeating the well-worn cliché “there’s no such thing as a free lunch”, would probably say “never”. And perhaps consumers in the 21st Century have been bombarded by so many unlikely offers that they are simply inured to misleading advice. The details, after all, are usually in the fine print, if anyone can be bothered to check. What’s the difference, after all, between Sky offering “free” Sky Sports to its paying customers, and mobile phone customers offering “free” texts to its paying customers? Or “free” mobile phones to customers who have to pay money to use them every month? To quote Orange’s current Monkey offer: “Get free music, texts and a free daily internet pass, just for topping up £5 on Monkey”. So, spend money to get something free. These “offers” are such an established feature of bundled service marketing (and commercial life in general) if anything it's surprising that Sky felt the need to respond. A liberal deployment of asterisked fine print should help Sky avoid similar problems in future. Client Reading: Apple TV: Still Just a Hobby? Or Another Nail in Pay Television's Coffin?

Many thanks to Jeff Baumgartner at Light Reading for reminding me of my post last September concerning ActiveVideo Networks and the company's suitability as a potential Cisco acquisition. I had also just noted that ActiveVideo is planning to exhibit on Cisco's stand at this year's IBC starting tomorrow. I'm sure the relationship is quite harmless at the moment, but who knows where things may lead? If you're at IBC, hurry to register for our free-to-attend 3DTV Analyst Forum. We’ll be presenting great insights from our 3DTV research, and Sky’s Brian Lenz, who has headed up the company’s 3D initiative, will be giving the audience his thoughts on our findings as well as an update on Sky’s 3D launch plans. Attendees are invited to register in advance by visiting www.strategyanalytics.com/ibc2010.html. Meet Our Analysts: 3DTV Analyst Forum at IBC 2010

This year’s IFA www.ifa-berlin.de nicely summed up the opposing challenges facing the next wave of TV technologies. The plethora of new connected TVs on display from every major manufacturer seemed barely able to cope with the variety of Internet and managed content and applications available. By contrast, the many 3D-enabled TVs seemed starved of suitable material with which to show off their capabilities. Watching the 3D story unfold at IFA also served as a nice hors-d’oeuvres to this weekend’s IBC in Amsterdam, when you can learn more about industry and consumer adoption of 3D at our Analyst Forum: it’s not too late to register at www.strategyanalytics.com/ibc2010.html. Given that internet TV, or connected TV, or “smart TV”, depending on your preferred nomenclature, has been at least a decade in the making, perhaps it is inevitable that it seems to be making faster progress towards mass market adoption than 3DTV, which, in spite of decades-old visions, has really only begun to gather speed in the last year or two. Nevertheless, it was clear from duplicate and triplicate demonstrations of the same 3D animated movies and football games that the dearth of 3D-originated content remains 3DTV’s biggest challenge. Which makes it all the more strange that most of IFA’s big names were extremely reluctant to promote the ability of their 3DTVs to turn bog standard 2D into 3D content, on the fly and with no additional hardware required. As various Sony, Panasonic and Samsung representatives explained, to one degree or another “in-set” 2D-3D conversion was not yet considered “good enough” to warrant live demonstrations to the German technology-buying public or indeed the rest of the industry. Sony came close to giving the game away: the information board behind a line of 3DTVs noted the fact that any 2D content could be converted to 3D “by pushing a button on the remote control”. But when asked to demonstrate this functionality we were informed it was not possible on the show floor. Samsung’s stand also featured a large number of 3DTV demonstrations, all of which featured 3D-originated content of one sort or another. The only real time 2D-3D conversion demonstration featured games material. Other 3DTV sets around the stand could be switched to 3D conversion but staff were unable to supply glasses so that the effect could be appreciated. Panasonic’s representative was open in admitting that the company was behind in devlopment of in-set 2D-3D conversion technologies, and only included it as a feature “because everyone else was”. I got the strong sense that staff on many stands were tired of deflecting questions about 2D-3D and that their lives would have been made slightly less tedious if demonstrations had been available. The major exception to this was of course Toshiba. Of course, because Toshiba continues to push its Cell processor technology as a platform for real-time rendering and upscaling of 2D to 3D content. Toshiba was the major firm least backward in coming forward with in-set 2D-3D conversion, offering a number of demonstrations open to public view. These included one which claimed to offer conversion of “regular” 3D TV broadcasts to “full” 3D. The demonstration offered side-by-side comparison of otherwise identical content. To my own eyes this was not too impressive, with artefacts clearly visible in the upscaled version, even if the overall effect from a distance was greater sharpness. It was certainly a long way from matching the Blu-ray 3D experience. Toshiba also demonstrated “standard” 2D-3D conversion, which was less problematic although mild “ghosting” effects were visible. However the 3D effect, while obvious, lacked any great depth. Having said that Sony’s TV people were not discussing “in-set” conversion, around the corner the company’s Vaio group had probably the most impressive real-time 2D-3D conversion I have yet seen. A prototype Vaio used a combination of hardware (graphics card) and software (both in prototype development stage) to convert 1080p MPEG4 video to full HD 3D (2*1080p), the equivalent of the Blu-ray 3D standard. The product is currently targeted for Q1 2011 availability as a notebook product. 3D was selectable on the prototype by pressing a 3D button. Clearly the processing power required for this impressive demonstration is unlikely to feature in a TV set in the near future, but it is surely only a matter of time before it becomes widely available in mass consumer products. The sensitivity around 2D-3D conversion was the story that dared not speak its name at this year’s IFA. Yes, the technology is immature and the quality falls short of “true” 3D productions. But that will change and the content-owner dam which is currently holding it back will eventually break. As we will see at our 3DTV Analyst Forum, the TV production industry itself remains unconvinced that it should invest in 3D technology until issues such as this begin to settle down. Meet Our Analysts: 3DTV Analyst Forum at IBC 2010

It’s been implied on more than one occasion by various commentators that the arrival of 3DTV is “too soon” because many people have only recently bought their first HDTV and will be reluctant to invest once again in a new technology. The argument makes sense on the surface, but, as usual, a little digging into real data tends to prove otherwise. Our survey of 700 UK consumers found that current HDTV owners were in fact more than twice as likely to be interested in buying a 3DTV than non-HDTV owners. Specifically, 13% of HDTV owners say they are “somewhat” or “very likely” to buy a 3DTV during the next 12 months, compared to 6% of non-HDTV owners. Given that HDTVs are still in only half of UK households, this hardly suggests that 3DTV’s prospects are being held back because people have already bought an HDTV set. The truth is that it’s likely to be the same early adopters who bought HDTV who will also go out and buy the next latest and greatest TV technology. We’ll be presenting these and many more insights from our research at a free-to-attend analyst forum during this year’s IBC, and Sky’s Brian Lenz, who has headed up the company’s 3D initiative, will be giving the audience his thoughts on our findings as well as an update on Sky’s 3D launch plans. Attendees are invited to register in advance by visiting www.strategyanalytics.com/ibc2010.html. Meet Our Analysts: 3DTV Analyst Forum at IBC 2010

3DTV will again be one of the hot topics at this year’s IBC in Amsterdam. Unlike previous years, however, discussions and demonstrations will take place against the background of broadcasters delivering commercial 3D services to residential TV viewers. Since earlier this year 3D television programmes have been broadcast, if only on a selective basis, to viewers of some cable, satellite and IPTV services in the US and Europe. But as sales of 3D-capable TVs begin to take off, Sky’s UK launch of the first full-time 3DTV channel on October 1st will confirm the arrival of 3DTV as a fully fledged consumer proposition. But compared to the excessive hype which has built up over the last couple of years as the industry geared up for launch, the mood this year may appear to be markedly more realistic, and tinged with more notes of caution than were previously evident. It’s still too early to discuss consumer reaction to fully fledged home 3DTV services (as opposed to any of the out-of-home options) – the number of people who have actually seen a 3DTV broadcast in the comfort of their own homes is still tiny. But pre-launch surveys are suggesting 3D in general may not become the sure-fire success many were hoping for. Strategy Analytics’ own consumer surveys suggest a very mixed response across the board. Our survey of European consumers is still in the field, but the first results from the US suggest that the industry must at least overcome doubts about the health impact of watching 3DTV. More than half of respondents are unsure whether watching 3DTV can cause damage to the eyes, and 17% actually believe that 3DTV may cause damage. With the level of uncertainty the industry clearly has a lot of work to do to bring 3DTV to the mass market. Overall we found that 11% of people are somewhat or very likely to buy a 3DTV during the coming year. This may not sound a lot but it’s not bad for a newly launched technology. What’s interesting is the impact of previous 3D experiences on buying intentions. In total 60% of Americans say they have seen a 3D movie at the cinema, and a quarter say they have been very impressed with the quality of the 3D experience. Those people are four times more likely to buy a 3DTV than people who say they were not impressed with 3D at the cinema. This may not be surprising, but it demonstrates the importance to the industry of continuing to improve the 3D experience in the cinema in order to meet its overall goal of bringing 3D to the home viewer. We’ll be presenting many more findings from our research at our free-to-attend analyst forum during this year’s IBC, and Sky’s Brian Lenz, who has headed up the company’s 3D initiative, will be giving the audience his thoughts on our findings as well as an update on Sky’s 3D launch plans. Attendees are invited to register in advance by visiting www.strategyanalytics.com/ibc2010.html. Meet Our Analysts: 3DTV Analyst Forum at IBC 2010