Bamboom Labs wants to help people cut their cable cords by putting local TV broadcasts online with all the digital trimmings -- that is, the ability to watch live or recorded shows in high definition on any device with a browser, anywhere a broadband connection is available. It's technologically ingenious, but I can't decide whether it's a service the market has been waiting for or a lawsuit waiting to happen. Or maybe it's a solution to a problem not many people are eager to solve.

The New York-based startup is the brainchild of Chaitanya "Chet" Kanojia, former chief executive of Navic Networks, whose technology in set-top boxes enabled cable and broadcast networks to measure audience demographics and match advertisements to them in real time. His time at Navic taught him that at any given moment, about half of pay TV viewers were tuned in to local broadcast channels. That observation led him to believe that if he could get live broadcast signals to people reliably, with the ability to time-shift shows and watch them on any device, and with the social features of the Internet, they'd be more willing to abandon cable and satellite TV.

Other companies have taken on parts of this challenge. For example, Sling Media makes set-top boxes that let people tune in remotely to the TV service they have at home. And Monsoon Multimedia makes set-tops that combine remote viewing with TiVo-like digital video recording. But those devices build off of the programming that pay TV delivers to homes. Kanojia wanted to let people watch local broadcasts  through the Net without the help of pay TV.

Here's where things get complicated.

While Time Warner Cable and Cablevision deliver conventional television programming to their customers' iPads, other companies are trying to use the tablet to redefine what TV might be. A good example is the San Francisco-based Remixation, the company behind Vodpod, which unveils an intriguing online video application for the iPad Wednesday.

The free app, Showyou, enables people to create and watch personalized streams of online video. Instead of relying on the talents of TV studios and network programming executives, it draws from user-generated content sites (YouTube, Vimeo and TED at the moment) and social networks (Facebook, Twitter and Vodpod). And it takes advantage of the touch screen on the iPad (or iPhone or iPod Touch) to make it easier to navigate through the grid of shows, rather than the up-down and left-right buttons of a TV remote.

The short-term goal is to be "the best app on your phone or your tablet for finding video and sharing it with your friends," Chief Executive Mark Hall said. But "the more provocative long-term vision" is to become a prime-time TV alternative.

Let's get something straight right up front: Online music lockers are inherently lame.

This point was established years ago, when a bunch of companies (MyPlay, MP3.com, Musicbank) tried and failed to make online music lockers appealing to the masses. Amazon's entry into the field strikes me as no more appealing than its forebears, although it has a few advantages that may improve its prospects.

The basic problem with locker services is that they don't entertain. They merely provide access to one's music collection remotely, kind of the way an MP3 player does but with a less satisfying user interface. (For example, it takes three clicks to play any song stored in Cloud Drive. Ugh.) And unless the service buys licenses from the rights holders to make copies of tracks for their customers, users have to upload their songs into their lockers manually. So if you have a sizable music collection, filling your locker can be painfully laborious and time-consuming.

Amazon's Cloud Drive service boasts three potentially useful features that the failed locker services of yore didn't have:

• It's tied to Amazon's MP3 store, and the company automatically puts a copy of your purchases into your locker.
• It has an Android app, so it works on Android-powered smartphones and tablets. Those devices have less storage than the typical PC, so it makes sense to use them with an online locker.
• It can store other types of files too, including pictures and videos. Those files tend to be large, though, and Amazon provides only 5 GB of locker online free. Go above that limit and the service gets pricey in a hurry, charging $1 per year for each gigabyte. (Files bought through Amazon don't count against the storage limit.)

The biggest shortcoming of the service is probably the inability to automate uploads. Users have to browse through the computers to find the files they want to put in their lockers, and there's no way to have the locker automatically copy newly acquired MP3s -- unless they're bought from Amazon. That doesn't compare well with Rdio's ability to scan your music collection and fill a locker for you (a feature that Rdio includes in its $5-a-month music-streaming service, and that it has to pay the music industry extra royalties for).

I doubt that Amazon launched the service to sell online lockers. Instead, it appears to be an attempt to add value to Amazon's MP3 store. For now, at least, Amazon is the only place to buy music that's automatically available wherever you go on your (Android) smartphone or tablet, or on any computer you use. But then, Lala offered that and more, letting people fill their lockers with streaming-only songs that cost only 10 cents each. And by the time Apple bought Lala in December 2009, it had yet to break even.

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AT&T's bandwidth caps: a bad deal for whom?

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

The blog Broadband Reports broke some bad news over the weekend for AT&T DSL customers. Starting May 2, AT&T plans to stop offering flat-rate pricing for unlimited Internet use. Instead, it will impose a monthly cap of 150 GB on its DSL subscribers and 250 GB on its U-Verse customers. (U-Verse is the pay-TV service that AT&T transmits over high-speed phone lines; the cap would apply only to those customers' Internet use, not their TV viewing.) Those who exceed the limit will be charged $10 for every additional 50 GB they consume.

The company says its average DSL customer uses a mere 18 GB a month, and just one out of each 50 customers has been exceeding the new limits -- presumably someone who downloads or streams a lot of video, games or software. To put it in some perspective, consider the case of an online video fan. At standard-definition data rates, that person would need to watch (or download) more than six hours of full-screen video a day to hit 150 GB. High definition video is much more of a bandwidth hog, but even then an AT&T customer could download one a day and still have plenty of room left under a 150 GB cap.

On the other hand, it's troubling when a broadband provider that faces little competition summarily raises prices, particularly when the move hurts rivals in a separate market. AT&T's pay-TV service competes with online video-on-demand offerings from Netflix, Amazon, Vudu, Apple and CinemaNow, to name just a few. If the bandwidth caps deter consumers from using those services, that's a very bad thing.

The move was condemned by Free Press, an advocacy group that's been among the most vigorous proponents of strong Net neutrality rules (and, as such, a frequent critic of AT&T). Echoing the Bells' arguments against those rules, S. Derek Turner of Free Press called AT&T's caps "a poor solution to an unproven problem, and it will have a chilling effect on economic growth and innovation online."

I wonder about that, too, and about the chances of AT&T increasing the caps steadily as bandwidth prices continue to drop and the demand for data grows. As Turner put it, "When ISPs force their customers to watch the meter, experimentation, innovation and business will suffer."

One thing that he failed to note, though, is that the caps are a better deal for most broadband users than all-you-can-eat pricing that forces them to subsidize the outsized data appetites of a small minority. That's the dirty little secret of the flat-rate pricing model that AOL made standard across the Net: It costs most users more than they would have to spend under the pay-as-you-go model.

All the same, consumers love the flat-rate model because they don't have to worry about the incremental cost of each session online, or about getting the same sort of nasty surprise in their broadband bill that they occasionally receive from their mobile phone company. So it may be that even modest users of AT&T DSL switch to cable modems after the caps go into effect -- assuming their cable provider isn't Comcast, which imposes a 250 GB cap.

For its part, AT&T pledges that none of its customers will be caught unaware by the new caps. It plans to alert them when they reach 65%, 90% and 100% of the limit, and not to impose the extra charges until they've exceeded the caps three times. And those who reach their limits have a way around the extra charge: They can read e-mail, watch videos and send tweets on their smartphones. Unless, of course, they've already hit their wireless data caps.

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-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

Having played with Rdio's updated iPhone app for a week or so, I find myself sinking even more deeply into the tank for subscription-music services. If they can get the mobile aspect right -- and Rdio's update is much closer to "right" than the beta version -- I believe that subscriptions will finally deliver on the "any song, anywhere, anytime" promise that made them so interesting.

Like Rhapsody, Napster, MOG and other subscription-music services, Rdio offers consumers unlimited access to an online jukebox for a flat monthly fee: $5 for use only on a PC, $10 to add mobile devices and living-room gear. Rdio's particular strength is the way it applies social tools to music discovery. The service lets users follow other Rdio subscribers, then prominently displays the ever-changing lists of albums, songs and playlists that are getting the most play within that group. It's a beguiling way to learn about new artists and tracks.

The beta of the Rdio mobile app, however, offered too thin a slice of what Rdio provided on a PC. It showed you what was popular within your group and what you'd been playing lately; displayed the playlists you'd added to your collection; and allowed you to search for artists, albums and songs. But there was no recommendation engine, no list of new releases, and no way to wander through the broader Rdio members to find new people to follow or playlists to add.

The best aspect of the app, in my view, was the ability to load a mobile phone with songs "rented" from Rdio, avoiding the battery drain and occasional hiccups on a mobile or WiFi network. That's particularly handy on the iPod Touch, which doesn't have the continuous connectivity of a mobile phone. The songs remain on the device until you delete them or cancel your subscription, whichever comes first.

The update -- dubbed version 1.0 -- adds browsable lists of new releases and the most popular albums, songs and playlists on Rdio; album recommendations, which are based on your activity on the service; and a greatly improved search capability that also looks for matches among playlists and Rdio's membership. In short, it's a portal into far more of the Rdio experience.

It's still missing some important elements, such as the ability to build and collaborate on playlists, to follow like-minded listeners and to easily explore the broader Rdio community. (The latter is do-able, it's just not simple or intuitive.) I'm also eager to see a similar update for the Android application. Nevertheless, the new iPhone app is a great leap forward.

The last big pieces of the puzzle for subscriptions, I think, are easy and affordable ways to plug them into the living room and the car. Devices such as the Roku player, the Logitech Squeezebox and the Sonos ZonePlayer are providing solutions for the home, although not necessarily at a mass-market price. And a growing number of automakers (and aftermarket suppliers) are enabling drivers to plug mobile devices into their car stereos, either with a wire or via Bluetooth.

Granted, there's still the widely held view that subscriptions aren't as good a value as 99-cent MP3s. But it's not an either-or proposition. Think of subscriptions as a premium cable approach to television, not to be confused with buying complete seasons on DVD. As services like Rdio bring more of their features to their mobile apps, the premium-cable approach looks better and better.

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Who says music subscription services are dead?

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

Credit: Rdio.com

A federal judge in New York ordered Internet TV service Ivi to shut down Tuesday, finding that it violated the copyrights of a group of broadcasters and Major League Baseball. It was yet another example of a tech company trying in vain to stretch the boundaries of copyright law to avoid paying as much for content as its more conventional competitors.

Ivi TV captured the broadcasts of 55 stations in Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago and New York, then retransmitted them through the Internet to subscribers for a fee of just under $5 a month. For an additional 99 cents a month, viewers could pause, rewind and fast-forward shows, although they could not record them for later viewing.

Copyright law gives cable operators the right to carry broadcast stations if several conditions are met, and provided that they pay a small portion of their revenue in royalties. But the law also requires that cable operators abide by Federal Communications Commissions regulations, which (among other things) give broadcasters the right to demand higher fees for retransmission rights.

Ivi argued that it was a cable system entitled to carry broadcast signals, but also that it was an Internet service and so immune from FCC regulation. As such, it argued that it could retransmit stations online while paying royalties -- about $100 a year, according to U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald's ruling. Major League Baseball and two dozen broadcasters and studios (including two arms of the Tribune Co., owner of the Los Angeles Times) sued, arguing that Internet-based services aren't cable systems and as such are not entitled to an automatic (or "compulsory") retransmission license.

Buchwald agreed, granting a preliminary injunction against Ivi. She held that Congress created the compulsory license for local cable systems, not national (or global) operators online, and did so within a larger regulatory framework:

Congress legislated with an understanding that the cable systems it was granting a compulsory license to would also be subject to the regulations of the FCC.... [N]o company or technology which refuses to abide by the rules of the FCC has ever been deemed a cable system for purposes of the Copyright Act. Significantly, companies such as AT&T U-Verse, which claim to operate outside of the jurisdiction of the Communications Act, still comply with these rules, most significantly by obtaining retransmission consent.

She also said that if Ivi's interpretation of the law were taken to its logical conclusion, the result would be absurd:

As plaintiffs argue, defendants’ view of Section 111 essentially means that anyone with a computer, Internet connection, and TV antenna can become a “cable system” for purposes of Section 111. It cannot be seriously argued that this is what Congress intended.

Ivi had a number of supporters among pro-technology public-interest groups, which argued that Ivi benefited the public by providing more competition to incumbent cable and satellite TV services. But Buchwald held that the law doesn't hold the door open to online competitors, who cannot enter the market without the permission of the broadcasters whose signals they seek to retransmit.

The company and its allies also tried to persuade the court not to act until the lawsuit could go to trial, arguing that Ivi is too small to divert a meaningful amount of advertising away from broadcast TV in the interim. Buchwald pointedly disagreed:

Defendants cannot seriously argue that the existence of thousands of companies who legitimately  use plaintiffs’ programming and pay full freight means that Ivi’s illegal and uncompensated use does not irreparably harm plaintiffs. Likewise, they cannot contend that since Ivi is small and plaintiffs are large, they should be allowed to continue to steal plaintiffs’ programming for personal gain until a resolution of this case on the merits. Such a result leads to an unacceptable slippery slope.

It's easy to understand why companies like Ivi keep trying to find ways to deliver TV signals despite the limits imposed by time, space and contracts. Live broadcast television remains the most popular video medium in U.S. homes, attracting the biggest audiences and generating the most advertising dollars. Only a few companies have found a way to do so without running afoul of TV industry lawyers -- TiVo and Sling being two good examples. Others, such as ReplayTV and ICraveTV, have not. Buchwald's decision Tuesday was just a preliminary one, but she moved Ivi much closer to the latter category than the former.

[Updated at 2:22 p.m.: Ivi TV Chief Executive Todd Weaver responded to the ruling with a statement. Here's the money quote:

Judge Buchwald's opinion is premised on her statement that ivi is 'not complying with the rules and regulations of the FCC'. This conclusion is simply false, as ivi has met with the all the commisioner's offices of the FCC repeatedly and has received assurances that we are in full and complete compliance. Judge Buchwald makes the legal mistake of misinterpreting the copyright law to instead make communications policy. Communications policy is the province of the FCC and, by basing a judicial copyright decision on communications regulations to be administered by the FCC, the judge is overstepping her constitutional authority.]

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-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

Netflix released some thought-provoking data Thursday that could help consumers torn between DSL and cable-modem service. Judging by those numbers, if your top priority is streaming video, go with cable modem.

The company issued the first of what it said would be monthly charts tracking how well different broadband Internet service providers delivered Netflix's high-definition movie streams. The faster the delivery (i.e., the higher the throughput), the better the picture quality is.

Those streams leave Netflix's servers at 4.8 Mbps, but the servers routinely downshift to slower data rates when they confront congestion on the path to the customer's home. (Netflix tries to keep that path as short as possible by using content delivery networks operated by the likes of Level 3.) How much they have to downshift -- and sacrifice picture quality -- depends in part on how much bandwidth the customer buys. But it also depends on how well the ISP manages the traffic on the facilities that its customers share.

According to Netflix, the seven ISPs with the best throughput are all cable operators: Charter, Comcast, Time Warner, Cox, Suddenlink, Cablevision and Cable One. They all offered throughputs this month from 2.3 Mbps to 2.7 Mbps. Verizon and AT&T were next, clocking in at 2 Mbps to 2.2 Mbps in January. At the bottom of the list were Clearwire, a wireless broadband provider, and regional telephone companies Frontier and CenturyLink, which delivered throughputs of 1.4 Mbps to 1.6 Mbps this month.

Before Charter starts gloating, it should note that Rogers, a Canadian cable operator, averaged 3 Mbps in the Netflix HD tests.

The test is one way for Netflix, whose streams account for more than 20% of U.S. Internet traffic during peak times, to goad ISPs into improving throughput. ISPs, meanwhile, want Netflix to pick up more of the cost of delivering streams on their networks -- an idea that gets little or no support from Netflix Chief Executive Reed Hastings.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

One trend on display at last week's Consumer Electronics Show was the gradual expansion in online content available on connected TVs. Major set manufacturers continue to confine their sets to a walled garden of sites and apps that they have approved, but the turf is expanding and the barriers to entry are dropping. For example, manufacturers are making application development kits widely available, instead of just providing them to selected software companies.

Meanwhile, upstarts continued to announce products or technologies designed to bring the entire unfiltered Web to the TV screen. Two particularly clever ones came from Orb and Snapstick.

The former recently started selling a $99 device, called Orb TV, that enables people to stream shows from Hulu and other websites to their TV sets, circumventing the problems that have stopped the free version of Hulu from being displayed by the Boxee box and similar set-tops.

Its follow-up, which was announced at CES, is a $19.95 disc that in effect turns any Blu-ray player with BD Live functionality (including those in a PlayStation 3) into an Orb TV device. Like the Orb TV, the Orb BR software relies on a smart phone or a laptop to act as the remote control. Unlike the Orb TV, though, it's capable of delivering video to the TV screen in high definition.

(I can't resist noting how entrepreneurs keep coming up with uses for BD Live functionality that Hollywood studios and consumer electronics companies didn't have in mind when they were drawing up the standard. But then, that's the beauty of standards.)

Snapstick doesn't have actual products yet, just SplitMedia technology that it demonstrated and a deal it announced with D-Link to conduct a trial of SplitMedia in an undisclosed product this year. Here's how it works: Users select a video to watch by browsing the Web on a mobile phone, tablet or laptop running Snapstick's software. Then, with a shake of the phone or a swipe on their computer, they can send what they're watching wirelessly to a Snapstick-equipped set-top box connected to the TV set.

Bob Patterson, a spokesman for Snapstick, said users could send the video to multiple screens simultaneously, provided they were all connected to a set-top running Snapstick's software, and all were logged in to the same account. One advantage of the software, he said, is that it doesn't rely on the smart phone or laptop to stream content from the Web. Once a video is snapped to the TV, the phone or laptop is free to be used for something else -- say, sending snarky tweets about what you're watching.

The show also featured a number of companies that simply make it easier to connect a computer to a digital TV set, essentially turning the TV into a big computer monitor. For example, iGugu's $99 InterneTV consists of cables to connect the PC to the TV and a remote control with a QWERTY keyboard that can be operated with one hand. And Veebeam's products ($99 and $139 for standard definition and high definition, respectively) consist of a USB dongle that beams video from a PC or laptop to a set-top box plugged into an HDTV.

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-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

There's something Orwellian about machines that can identify people by looking at their faces. In fact, the facial-recognition software being developed by Viewdle, a San Francisco-based start-up, has its roots in technology created for the surveillance-happy government of the former Soviet Union. But Viewdle has found broader and far more consumer-friendly uses for its wares.

The company has been conducting an invitation-only trial of desktop-computer software that automatically identifies faces in photos and videos, then "tags" the files with this information. At the Consumer Electronics Show last week, Viewdle demonstrated an application that can do the same with a smart phone camera, automatically and in real time. That made Viewdle the first company to show "real visual computing that works in a mobile device," Chief Executive Laurent Gil claimed.

The company, which is selling the technology to other companies in the mobile-phone industry, expects versions of the app to be available by the end of the year.

Viewdle automates the labor-intensive process of tagging photos and uploading them to Facebook. That sort of convenience will appeal most to young people who are "all about sharing the moment" and documenting their lives through their mobile-phone cameras, Gil said.

The app determines identities by comparing the faces seen by the camera's lens with images previously stored on the phone. That's a twist on the usual practice of trying to match faces against a vast online database. It also uses a comparison technique -- morphing images to try to match unknown faces with known ones -- that's faster and requires less computing horsepower than the conventional practice of comparing multiple features of the unknown face against those in identified images, Gil said.

For the app to work, users have to build up a database on their phones of tagged photos that Viewdle can use as a reference. The software makes the task easier, though, by logging into Facebook and collecting information from the photos they've tagged there.

Facial recognition is just the first step for Viewdle, whose morphing technique can be used to recognize any physical object seen by a camera -- stairways, cars, animals, you name it. Other potential uses include augmented-reality applications for gaming and commerce, said Jason Mitura, Viewdle's chief product officer. For example, a retailer could add virtual displays to its store stocked with its online-only inventory, with interactive 3-D images of those products visible through a smart phone camera lens.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

The conventional wisdom going into the Consumer Electronics Show this week was that the major manufacturers were shifting their focus from 3-D TVs to Internet-connected sets, given that 3-D sales hadn't lived up to last year's suffocating hype. That notion turns out to be misleading; set makers seem to have no less enthusiasm for 3-D than they did before. There's just not as much hype.

Part of the reason is that connectivity is far ahead of 3-D as a phenomenon in consumer electronics. Samsung executives said that an estimated 2.5 million Internet-enabled TVs sold in the U.S. last year, with expected sales increasing to 9 million in 2011; the numbers for 3-D TVs in the U.S. are about 1 million in 2010, 6 million in 2011.

Seemingly every set maker is adding more connected models to their lineups than 3-D models, in part because the latter are frequently available only on larger screen sizes. And Internet-enabled TVs themselves represent just a fraction of the connected-TV market. Sony Corp. Chairman Howard Stringer said that more than 50 million TV screens in the U.S. alone will be Internet-enabled this year, either directly or through set-top boxes and game consoles.

The industry also got carried away with increasingly bullish projections for 3-D sales last year, with Samsung predicting up to 4 million in 3-D TV sales based on Amazon's initial sales. As it turned out, sales were roughly where the Consumer Electronics Assn. predicted they would be a year ago, said James Sanduski, senior vice president of home entertainment sales for Panasonic Consumer Electronics. And as low as those sales may seem in relation to the early buzz, they're still significantly higher than initial sales of HDTVs and Blu-ray players. One reason: The initial premium consumers must pay for 3-D in a set ($300 to $500, Sanduski said) is much smaller than it was for high definition ($1,000 to $1,500).

Still, some significant hurdles remain to mass adoption of 3-D in the home. The biggest of these may be the paucity of 3-D programming. A few new sources were announced this week, including a long-awaited 24-hour cable channel of 3-D nature programming by Sony, Discovery Channel and Imax; online 3-D video-on-demand from Vudu; a switch from part-time to full-time programming on ESPN's 3-D channel; and 3-D streaming by Verizon to Panasonic Blu-ray players for customers on its fiber-optic network. But the key breakthrough will come when 3-D reaches basic cable, said Eisuke Tsuyuzaki, Panasonic's chief technical officer.

He predicted a gradual migration of 3-D programming from pay-per-view tiers to premium cable channels and sports networks. A premium 3-D tier is "a model that makes sense" for pay-TV services, he said, adding that there could be enough programming this year to create a block of a dozen 3-D channels.

To attract the masses, though, "3-D must be on a regular, sustained basis," Tsuyuzaki said. And it will have to come from a cable network, he said, because the broadcast networks and local stations can't do 3-D over the air. They'd have to continue their 2-D broadcasts at the same time, and they don't have the airwaves needed to transmit both signals simultaneously.

Another issue, Sanduski said, is potential consumer confusion over 3-D glasses. Numerous CES booths featured glasses-free 3-D TV screens, typically as prototypes or proofs of concept. But executives from across the industry warned that the technology had a long way to go before it could be commercialized and built into the big screens consumers are demanding for their living rooms.

Updated, 4:35 p.m.: Toshiba disagrees -- strongly -- about the market readiness of glasses-free TV. It had fully functional prototypes on display of three glasses-free products that it expects to begin selling late this year on in early 2012: 65-inch and 56-inch LCD TVs and a laptop. All rely on screens that emit separate, angled beams of light to the left and right eyes to create the illusion of depth.

Carrie Cowan, product manager of Toshiba America's digital products division, acknowledged that the glasses-free "parallax" system doesn't produce images that pop off the screen the way rival technologies do. The system also doesn't offer a wide, uniform viewing angle; instead, the 3-D images are visible at certain spots in front of the screen. Viewers in other positions may see a 2-D image or a blurry one.

The point of the exercise is to create a 3-D option for consumers who simply don't like the idea of watching through glasses. The company also is developing ways to overcome some of the drawbacks of the parallax system -- for example, the laptop uses its built-in webcam to track the position of the viewer's eyes, shifting the display's 3-D sweet spot to match the viewer's movements.

Another potential complication for consumers is that set makers' united front over the type of glasses to use -- active shutter glasses -- started to crack, with at least one major manufacturer (LG) announcing sets that will use lighter, less expensive polarized lenses. Others, such as Panasonic and Samsung, remain devotees of the shutter glasses, despite the added expense.

[Updated, 5 p.m.: Toshiba also plans to offer 3-D TVs that use polarized lenses.]

Hyunsuk Kim, senior vice president of Samsung's visual display research-and-development team, laid out the most commonly cited shortcomings of the passive-lens system: It cuts the picture resolution in half (delivering a different set of 540 lines to each eye simultaneously, rather than alternating between 1,080 lines for the right eye and left eye); adding polarization to the glass on the TV screen increases the cost of the set; and the polarized glass darkens the picture.

"Without resolving those problems, Samsung will never adopt" the passive-lens approach, Kim said.

3-D TVs are playing catchup to their smart brethren, but Panasonic President Shiro Kitajima predicted that the gap will narrow steadily in the coming years. By 2014, Kitajima said, connected TVs are expected to comprise up 42% of sales, while 3-D will make up almost a third.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

Photo: An attendee wears Intel Corp. InTru3D glasses at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Jan. 7, 2011. Credit: Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg