Sky to pack pubs with 3D TVs Sky has bought 15,000 3D TVs from LG and will install them in pubs... er... "public venues" the length and breadth of the land. Sky's 3D TV service is due to launch in April following a preview event held in January when nine UK pubs screened the Barclays Premier League match between Arsenal and Manchester United. …
Pubs are closing left right and centre and have been doing for at least ten years. Our local was experiencing a slow but steady decline in customers a few years back and the landlord decided that putting in a big telly and showing major sporting events would bring in the punters. Takings went into terminal decline, it wasn't just that he wasn't covering the costs of the Sky stuff, he was taking a lot less money than before. He soldiered on for 18 months before selling up. Somebody bought the pub, did away with the tellies and reopened it as a traditional boozer. No fruit machines, no jukebox and definitely no sky sports. The result? The business is now in rude health. The pub at the other end of the road with the big Sky Sports signs outside is, however, in decline.
Perhaps sooner or later the industry will spot that most people don't go to the pub to watch TV programmes chosen by somebody else. Most pub goers want to socialize and drink. You can't socialize with a big flat screen telly distracting you in dolby. Putting it all in 3D is not going to help.
Plenty of pubs survive on football audiences.
I am fortunate enough to have four pubs within a three minute walk of my house and one I visit principally for watching football. It is rammed for big club games and packed to the point of bursting for competitive England games.
On these occasions the crowd there easily outstrips the other three combined even if they offer good beer or live jazz or decent food.
I'm sure there are areas where the opportunity to watch televised football doesn't drive business in the same way that a good wine list or comfy sofas might but with a decent catchment area and a mixed potential clientele such as you'd get in most town centres or all across larger cities Sky can help good management keep a pub going.
> If you want to watch football in 3D, go to a football ground
Nice idea, but the last time I went to a Premiership match (Spurs v Man City, just less than a year ago) the three tickets cost £600 and were someone else's season tickets - so there was a chance we might not be allowed in. Not being a millionaire I am completely priced out of watching premier league football live - although I still make the odd trip to Prenton Park to watch Tranmere slide towards relegation.
I won't pay sky either - £45 a month is both unaffordable and morally objectionable - so the odd match down the pub is all I get to see outside of match of the day.
Sounds a bit harsh. For example, my brother has a season ticket for Old Trafford that cost him around £650 (I think). This equates to around £35 a game. If I want to watch football regularly but without the epic adventure of a trip to the ground every twice a month, £45 a month seems perfectly reasonable. Especially as this would buy all the other sport stuff, rugby, cricket etc.
Either way, its a choice. Choose to buy a ticket to a game, or choose to pay sky to watch it on tv, or choose to watch it in your local boozer. I'm fairly sure if you watch the game in your local you will be very quickly racking up the cost of sky sports every month now the cost of beer has gone up. Or choose to not do anything and stop whining that everything isn't free, and that you should just be entitled to watch it.
Dont just complain about sky. Football is becoming an expensive sport to be a watcher of generally.
Though I dislike Murdoch and avoid giving his compaines money, the one upside is that it could help drive LG's choice of polarising glasses - as opposed to Sony / Samsung active glasses strategy (i.e. make more money). Much lower cost, no batteries/recharging.
Question - with these polarising glasses, what "Tech" is in the 3D TV ? I can understand that the active glasses will require the TV to send out timing signals...
You need to send out information for each eye with a different polarization. I do not know for certain, but I can envisage two ways this could be done.
One is to install switchable polarization filters across the whole screen, and interleave left-and-right images while altering the polarization of the filter. This is quite simple to do (LCD screens rely on cross-polarized filters to work anyway, so probably means that instead of the single set of red-green-blue filters, you put two sets in, which allows you to have both-left showing the left image, both-right showing the right image and any combination of left and right showing nothing. It is not quite this simple, unfortunately, as you need degrees of filtering to allow you to show close to the whole range of colours. In addition, plasma TV's don't use polarizing filters, but could easily have a set added. You would also probably need an overall refresh rate of at least 100Hz to avoid perceivable flickering, and very fast acting plasma or LCD screens. On LCD screens, there may also be some left-right bleedthrough of the other image as well.
The second method is to double either the horizontal or vertical resolution (if you want to maintain the same resolution), and have alternate columns or rows behind fixed polarizing filters of different direction. You then feed the left image into the even columns or rows, and the right image into the odd columns or rows. This would work for both LCD and Plasma, and if done cleverly with LCD panels at little extra cost for the screen. You do not need to increase the refresh rate.
In both cases OLED screens would work like plasma screens.
If I were deciding on which system to use, I believe that I would opt for the second design, because I think it would be less complex to build (especially if you accept halved resolution as you could just modify the build process for existing panels), and probably cheaper.
I was in my better liked pubs the a few weeks ago and noticed they had a new plasma screen with "Sky 3D" written on it..
However it wasn't on and the football was playing in the corner on a 14" crt.
I think seeing a pub full of people with polarised glasses would look rather hillarious.
Polarised TVs work by either alternate columns or alternate rows of pixels being polarised 90 degrees apart, so that with glasses each containing a lens polarised 90 degrees apart, each eye see a separate image.
The main issues with it is that you only get half the vertical or horizontal resolution of the set when in 3D mode, and you have to keep your head straight to see the effect. The active shutter method gives the full resolution and works with your head in any orientation, but it does require twice as a high a refresh rate though to prevent the perception of the image flickering.
... I don't know anyone who wants to go to the pub to watch telly. The point of the pub is to avoid the telly and talk to real people.
All the pubs I know that have Sky are in decline, not least because of their ridiculous fee's.
Personally, I'll be going to the pub with no Sky stuffed infront of my face, 3D or not.
Sky will be offering a polarizing retinal implant at all branches of specsavers - free if you take a Sky sports subscription, take them up on this free operation and you will no longer need to wear greasy, pre-worn 3d specs in pubs - and you will be able to watch 3D TV on all public sets (until Sony invent a spin off technology - at which point you will need another implant).
thing is, how does this work when they have more than one show on? Whilst you might have just one match on when it's 'the big game' thats only a small proportion of the time, other times the pub will have the racing on and maybe the rugby ( friday night). How's that going to work?
oh right yeah, won't be 3d anyway will it..
100 quid each for specs? I'm sure the pubs are all *really* looking forward to it....
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