ESPN isn’t the only media company making 3-D news at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week.
Sony plans to announce a sponsorship of Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit issue — offering a 3D video version of the issue on its PlayStation 3 and web-enabled, 3D-compatible Bravia TVs and Blu-ray players.
According to Advertising Age, Sony — which will offer the half-hour video for rent ($4.99) or purchase ($7.99) starting Feb. 15 — hopes 3D bikinis will generate more awareness and buzz for its 3D products, though not a profit.
"There's sort of a chicken-and-egg problem going on right now, where the device penetration has been fairly low, so the studios have been fairly slow to release 3D content," Sony global digital video distribution VP and GM Michael Aragon told Ad Age. "Our expectation and our road map on this whole thing has been that this is going to be a little bit slower adoption than HD. While we might not be making tons of money on the 3D content, it seeds a universe of product that we have in 3-D."
And the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue — SI’s perennially-hyped and shamelessly-promoted affair — is as good a moment as any for a company like Sony to seed something.
In 2009, a then-battered outlined an aggressive new plan for profitability that banked on burgeoning 3D technology to pull the company out of a fiscal tailspin. At the time, Sony said that 3D TVs would account for $11.2 billion in new revenue over the next three years.
Last June, the company unveiled a new line of 3D Bravia sets, and said that 10 percent of the 25 million TVs it expected to sell this fiscal year (ending March 2011) would be 3D.
But in December, the company admitted that it would fall a bit short of its 2.5 million goal.
"Talking to customers," Sony executive deputy president Hiroshi Yoshioka told Reuters last month, "there are some who are worried about how much content has been prepared and others who mistakenly assume that 3D TVs can only show images in 3D."
