TV is the New Reading

How complicated does watching

TV have to be?

I was going to talk about “Undercover Boss” and how in a climate of jobless economic expansion it’s maybe a good idea for CEOs to experience first-hand the effects of the “new normal” and what it’s like trying to maintain productivity with fewer workers.

Everyone already knows that, however, so watching this show is a little depressing. Possibly one of the bosses will find a roomful of slackers to fire or just get mad and go off on his employees some week, but for the most part they’re probably going to encounter good people working very hard to scrape by and maintain some kind of life for themselves.

Instead, I'd like to talk about the simple act of watching television itself.

A few years ago the most exotic upgrade to television viewing was surround sound. Sets were upgraded to experience right and left channel mixes and people could upgrade further still with external speaker sets placed around a home theater setup.

I remember seeing big screen televisions that appeared to project an image from below, replaced by flat-screen televisions that were built to watch movies. The vertical-to-horizontal ratio for standard television broadcast now looked wrong, so television broadcast in high definition includes programming to the right and left sides of the screen that people with 4:3 ratio set can’t see.

That complaint brings full-circle the irritation from the ‘80s when VHS rentals would show cinematic productions in so-called “letterbox” format with black bars along the top and bottom of the screen, and people were complaining about that. Now that even basic cable is investing in HDTV, stragglers like myself will have to shell out for the larger screens. And to be fair, the costs are coming down, although they may already have overestimated how clearly I’d like to see every pore, hair, wrinkle and blemish on “The View.”

And that’s before we add a third dimension into the mix.

TV in 3-D

Three-dimensional television, perhaps the final frontier. From that cheesy set of effects on “Medium” a few years ago to ... well, honestly, what’s the point?

ESPN and ESPN2 are betting there’s a point. And I’m not saying as go ESPN and ESPN2, so goes the world, but if advertisers are going to invest to produce ads for a 3-D format, they’ll likely want to use them in cross markets like during NBC Olympic coverage and so forth and it’s just a matter of time before everyone’s TV is possessed by ghosts and shadow images, just like black-and-white sets from the 1950s.

So TV will only really work with glasses, and we might need both the red/blue and polarized glasses (possibly on top of our regular glasses) depending on the show or movie we’re watching and the ads involved. And it’s possible people will enjoy television even more in this manner.

It does seem if you’re watching through the red/blues you’d for sure either have to be watching or not -- it’s harder to multitask if you have to keep putting the glasses back on to watch or taking them off to do other things.

The polarized setup would be easier, of course. Easier still would be to just not do it, but I don’t see that happening. A lot has happened since the days of the flickering electrically charged cathode ray tube with the spherical screen and the slow refresh rate of tiny, grainy, black-and-white images. Television is broadcast in color, in surround sound, in high definition and in digital. It is delivered across the airwaves, by satellite and cable. It is available online and on your phone. No one is going to balk at adding a third dimension to it.

I just wonder if I’ll be able to tell if I’m getting a bad, warpy signal from when I’m getting a very high quality 3-D signal, or if I’ll need to put on my glasses to look.

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