Panasonic previews streaming 3D TV service

 

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Posted on 2 Sep 2010 at 00:49

Panasonic has demonstrated a service that could allow you to watch 3D movies on its TVs using nothing more than an internet connection.

Currently, if you want to watch 3D movies on your new 3D TV, then you'll need a 3D Blu-ray player. Unfortunately, only a limited selection of titles is currently available and they're relatively expensive. Panasonic has a demonstrated a prototype version of its AceTrax movie streaming service that can stream 3D movies over the internet to one of its internet-connected TVs.

AceTrax, run by a Swiss company and backed by Panasonic, is a recently launched online service that allows you to buy or rent movies over the internet using one of the company's internet-connected TVs. Purchased movies can be played on up to five devices, including PCs and Blu-ray players. You have 30 days to start playing a movie, and 24 hours to finish a film once you've started watching it, so its terms and conditions are very similar to Apple's iTunes.

We saw a demonstration version of a 3D version of the service at the IFA trade show and conference in Berlin. Subjectively, video quality looked comparable to the 720p content available from iTunes, so it's not quite up to Blu-ray standards, but the 3D effect looked great. The demonstration video started playing instantly, but this was a trailer rather than a full movie.

Unfortunately, Panasonic is merely testing the service at its research centres in Japan and California, so the company has no firm plans regarding the pricing and availability of streamed 3D movies. The demonstration version we saw did list a price of £5.49 for a 3D movie rental, but this looked like a placeholder. We also had no way of confirming if the impressive-looking demonstration we saw was actually running over the internet and not a local server. We also suspect the smooth playback of streaming 3D content could suffer on many of the slower broadband connections common in the UK.

Although Panasonic only demonstrated 3D streaming on its range of 3D TVs, the current AceTrax service is also available on any PC with the Microsoft Silverlight plug-in installed, so it's possible 3D-capable PCs could also play streamed 3D movies. Nevertheless, we hope that Panasonic brings the AceTrax 3D streaming service to the UK, if only to give us something to watch on 3D TVs.

Author: Alan Lu