In Europe the CE Manufacturers are placing thousands upon thousands of TVs into retail…the Broadcasters are trying to target those TVs. They will try to do 3D because there is nowhere left to go…I say nowhere left to go because we are caught in a technology driven business right now not a Content Driven business…Like many have said the Broadcasters have been producing Reality TV rubbish and there is hardly any decent, good quality programmes to watch. For technology we went this route: B&W-Colour-Digital SD-HD-we can even have super HD and now its 3D…The TV Manufacturers want to sell more Flat screens…now they have latched onto the Internet and are trying to become Broadcasters by offering their own portals and content…Its a scrappy-dappy-do mess in TV at the moment as we cannot settle down to creating one good format and make the best quality TV programmes for it without someone telling us that the “next best thing” is going to be “the next big thing”….The Broadcasters are being drawn into OTT, 3D and Catch-Up because they never saw it coming and its a knee jerk response business plan for having sat on their hands for so long they are responding to the hype…But as we have learnt so often – Hype and Reality never or hardly ever go together…I went to a local store yesterday to buy a fan for the office and in the shop they had the latest Panasonic 3D TV showing Volleyball…I gave it 15 minutes to see how I would react. It was a horrendous, nauseating, brain overload…and irrelevant to most peoples viewing needs. So as you can see I am not a fan – of Volleyball yes but not 3D TV. 😉
Tvangelist 
Anthony,
You’ve summed up my feelings exactly on the topic of 3D.
It’s weird – we’re going through a time now that I haven’t experienced before, where the technology capabilities have overtaken the actual business demands/models.
Not too long ago, it was always a case of ‘wait until next year’s chip comes out, then we’ll be able to do x,y,z’, and when the x,y,z came, it was lapped up by the masses. Currently the state of the art is dual 1080p HD decode, 3D, etc etc, but the actual content offerings and more importantly, consumer lust, is I feel lagging significantly.
I wouldn’t only constrain this to TV but also apply it to the smartphone market. When the iPhone 3GS came out, I thought to myself ‘I don’t know where Apple can go from here that isn’t just tweaks’. So they trumped me with the front-facing camera & gyro, but essentially it’s window dressing. It’s actually an over-capable piece of hardware, when you consider what most users are doing with it. As a hardware engineer, seeing unused silicon makes me a little bit sad…
Tom