Oscar-winning director James Cameron and business partner Vincent Pace were the toast of the inaugural ConnectedWorld.TV Awards, walking away with a special prize for their contribution to the broadcast industry.
The H
ollywood giants have effectively become evangelists for 3D technologies which they are confident that it will make the transition from the big screen, as in the case of Cameron’s landmark Avatar, to the small screen.
Receiving the award with the greatest of respect and clear humility, Cameron remarked that it would only be natural for 3D to progress toward multiple screens in particular tablets and smartphones.
The director however admitted that some challenges needed to be surmounted before 3D in broadcast could become a commercial reality. He said: “We’ve got a lot of technological hurdles to get past to do that, and there are a lot of strategic alliances that need to be made between the right companies and the right leadership needs to be shown to make this happen.
"But we’re in the same place right now [in broadcast] that we were five years ago in the movie business which is chicken and egg: the exhibitors wouldn’t put in the screens until the film makers and studios made the 3D movies and vice versa; the studios didn’t want to commit to the movies unless the screens were there. We feel the same sense of excitement now about broadcast that we felt in 2005 in the movie business.”
Thanking Connected World for the award, Price added: “I think a lot of people focus on the Hollywood aspect of where we started…the whole growth of companies has been on a strong platform of strong engineers and creative people to take [3D] out of mathematics and into the creative entertainment world and say ‘damn the numbers, if you like what you see on the screen let’s just do more of it.’ We’re just so impressed about what we see on the screen, whether it’s a broadcast event, a Martin Scorsese film or Avatar. The combination of that just says [3D] is here, it has that degree of enhancing entertainment as we know it.”
The full list of winners from the inaugural ConnectedWorld award will be announced ASAP