[By Ned Soseman, broadcastengineering.com]

[Philip Lelyveld comment: stories about this technology being implemented in Italy are here and here.]

At NAB, Utah Scientific and Sisvel Technology demonstrated a new form of 3-D broadcasting that is fully compatible with 2-D television displays, allowing 3-D and 2-D viewing of a single broadcast stream. This is made possible by 3-D Tile Format, an innovative technique for formatting stereoscopic images that integrates two 720p frames within a single 1080p frame. The reconstructed right and left images maintain their original 720p spatial and temporal resolution, giving viewers of both versions the full benefit of the original picture.

The 3-D Tile Format also provides better transmission quality of 3-D content than current solutions. It’s backward compatible, which allows broadcasters to transmit to both 2-D and 3-D users without the need for increased bandwidth. The 3-D/2-D-compatible system is already in use at QuartaRete TV in the Piedmont region of Italy as part of its DVB-T broadcast service and is being tested for implementation by several broadcasters elsewhere in Italy.

Utah Scientific and Sisvel Technology demonstrated a standard UTAH-400 digital router switching multiple 3-D and 2-D picture sources that are then mixed by a specially configured Utah Scientific MC-2020 master control switcher. The resulting program video stream was then encoded by the Sisvel Technology 3-D encoder and transmitted to the Utah Scientific booth over an RF link to simulate actual delivery conditions.

See the original post here: http://broadcastengineering.com/news/utah-scientific-and-sisvel-demonstrate-3-D-broadcasting/index.html