ESPN Says It Has No Roadmap for Live Sports in Native 4K

ESPN thinks there'll be limited sales potential in very large, very expensive 4K TV sets, so it sees “really no reason to pursue any kind of business model” in 4K content, said Bryan Burns, vice president-strategic business planning and development. “For us to take people, space, technology” and devote those resources to 4K, “it’s not even there now,” he said. “There’s nothing to do now."

"We readily acknowledge” at ESPN “that we hit the on-ramp early” for 3D TV, Burns said. Though many have pooh-poohed the 3D TV rollout as a bust, ESPN continues to have high hopes for 3D TVs in general and ESPN 3D in particular, he said. He cited DisplaySearch forecasts that global shipments of 3D-ready devices will reach 226 million units by 2019. For 4K TVs, however, Burns cited another survey from IHS iSuppli that pegs 4K as accounting for only 0.8 percent of global LCD TV shipments by 2017. “Comparing those two graphs, where should we put our time?” Burns asked. “What’s going to be out there for consumers to actually use -- and for many of them, not just a few?” Further crimping 4K TVs’ potential appeal, besides their high price tags, are doubts about the limited number of homes that will be able to “accommodate” the enormously large screens “it will actually take to really appreciate” a 4K picture, Burns said.

Lack of production tools is preventing ESPN from even experimenting with what might be possible in 4K, said Chuck Pagano, chief technology officer. “I'm building a new production facility, but there aren’t any 4K production tools for me to do anything with right now and we don’t have anything earmarked in that facility right now to be 4K-only."

ESPN plans “to start playing with” 4K production gear, but only to “add value in the 2K production space,” Pagano said. “When you oversample an image at 4K, you can actually electronically zoom and scan, instead of mechanically zooming and scanning, so you can find interesting areas in a picture.” For example, he said, a centerfield camera can use the technique to “dynamically zoom in” on first or third base, “so you don’t need to have the centerfield cameraman actually do a zoom. You can do an electronic version of it, since you have a richer pixel wall to deal with.” Pagano conceded that “we don’t know yet” how well the technique will work, because “there’s not much out there” in the way of 4K production tools.

Imagine a close play at third base, where “you can go back in a replay mode and blow that up,” Burns said of a 4K-based electronic zoom that might be used on a conventional HD live sportscast. “The clarity of the picture will really allow you to blow that up and put it into a 2D HD shot,” he said. “That’s the way we're looking at 4K right now.” Fox Sports has started experimenting with a 4K camera at select NFL games for a similar close-up replay application called “Super Zoom,” TV Technology reported last week.

ESPN has not really shot experimental footage in native 4K, Pagano said: “We have a camera, but it’s not a camera like we're used to. … It’s just for us trying to understand the sensitivities of what happens out there. We're still waiting for the real stuff to be delivered for us.” The Sony F65 4K camera ESPN bought is not “a production-ready, standard” piece of equipment the network customarily would use for live sports, he said. The F65 is geared “more toward the cinematic area,” he said. With tongue planted firmly in cheek, Pagano said ESPN has used the F65 for a “highly secretive program” the network internally calls “SAV,” short for “screwing around vigorously.” ESPN has been playing with the F65 to determine “what makes it tick, just to get a feel for what it’s going to deliver,” he said. But “we don’t even have a 4K monitor to watch it on,” he said.

4K is “not the same as the 3D development curve,” Pagano said. 3D didn’t necessitate “a rewrite” of the “fundamental” ATSC broadcast standard, as he thinks 4K will, he said: ATSC “was using stereoscopic current technology that we were able to play around with and route and build switchers to.” Long term, ESPN doesn’t know yet what impact 4K will have on “our ecospace,” he said. “In the near term, I do know it will have an impact on our production of 2K stuff, and that’s what we're most focused on right now.” Pagano envisions ESPN using 4K technology to perhaps create “super slow-mos that are bigger and better, of telling stories better,” he said.

Another possibility is for ESPN to use 4K as “a subset” for enhanced “raster” graphic images, such as for the “first-and-10” line it superimposes on Monday Night Football telecasts, he said. “I don’t know how it would work yet, but these are some of the things I keep hearing my guys dreaming up and thinking about how to utilize it. But the only challenge right now is there’s nothing out there for me to play with.” “Intrigued” as he was to hear Sony and other CE makers announce new 4K TV introductions for delivery this year, “I'm still more anxious about what’s going to be shown at NAB for the tools for me to do some creative stuff with,” he said.

The “ecosystem” for 4K, “if it does become something, really needs to have another Grand Alliance effort” to put it into practice, Pagano said. As with “the whole push of developing HD,” with 4K, “you've got to get everybody on board, because this is a big to-do,” he said. “The amount of bits you're going to need for distributing? This is four times the resolution of high definition now. The bigger issue is how do you even think about making a product for distribution, when there is no distribution pipeline that’s ready for it? It’s not going to be just one programmer. We don’t drive the market. You need others to drive the market if there is going to be a market."

ESPN’s new production facility is a 195,000-square-foot digital production center that the company has just “broken ground” on, and for which Pagano is now compiling a “shopping list” of production tools, he said. The center ultimately will be “format-agnostic,” he said. It will provide “tools and production facilities, regardless of what the format is, whether it’s 720p, 1080p, 4K or 8K in the future,” he said. The center can be made 4K-ready “if we ever want to get in that space, and I wouldn’t even know when to even think about even forecasting when that’s going to happen. There’s still a lot of variables out there that have got to be answered."

On ESPN 3D, Burns thinks it’s both a “problem” and an “opportunity” that DisplaySearch and others predict that the number of people who actually will watch 3D TV programming on their sets will lag significantly behind the number who'll buy those 3D-capable sets, Burns said. “We'd like to have other cousins of ours in the programming community come along more than they have to give consumers more choices” in 3D content, he said. Once there’s a bigger “installed base” of 3D-capable sets than there is now, “maybe there’s an opportunity to make this work,” he said. “We literally came out of the box” with ESPN 3D when there was virtually no installed base of 3D-capable sets, he said.

In hindsight, “I almost wish we would have waited a couple of years until there were some sets out there” for 3D, Burns said. “Two years ago, you couldn’t walk into Walmart and buy a screen for $389, but you can today. So maybe it would've been better to start now. But hindsight’s 20/20, and it’s what we do at our company.” When it comes to technology and sports at ESPN, “in some cases we'll go for it, and we went for it with 3D,” he said. “It’s as simple as that. We'll see now where this takes us.”