Sony is not betting on 3D, it merely tries to stay itself.

As we sat with Sony’s Stan Glasgow (at CES 2010 in the photo above) for a short group discussion in San Francisco, I was sure that today would yield a bunch of “Sony bets the farm of 3D” articles and here they are. Indeed, Sony is counting on 3D (stereo 3D) to boost its sales and margins, but talking about a ‘bet’ implies that Sony has another choice – it doesn’t.

Some have suggested that Sony should go attack the sub-$1000 HDTV segment because it is the fastest growing, but the truth is that Sony is not built for that, it doesn’t think like that, it’s not in its DNA. Despite a recent decline, the Sony brand -the company’s most formidable asset- is still very powerful, and going after the low-end market will probably destroy it, without giving Sony any assurance of a victory over Vizio, LG or Samsung. This is a no-win strategy. To keep its brandwhileincreasing its margins, Sony only has one option: go 3D all the way.

It doesn’t mean that the plan will work – far from it. Going 3G all the way in difficult economic times might actually be a dangerous undertaking, one that might hurt Sony financially if customers fail to bite.

But Sony is seeing a rare and unique situation where it might be able to leverage efforts from its electronics, gaming/entertainment and movie divisions to create an a (virtuous) maelstrom that would lift them to the top spot in 3D televisions, both in terms of units and profits. That’s Sony’s objective.

And Sony is putting all its resources to work: Sony knows that customers need to see 3D for themselves before they buy, so it has mounted a huge “hands-on” demonstration campaign across America.

In addition to that, Sony will secure exclusive content and push 3D gaming on the PlayStation 3, a domain where Microsoft has not been doing or announcing much lately. Building 3D games is harder too, and that’s not because the stereo-3D principles are hard to grasp for developers: it’s not. However, game developers have been relying on an array of 2D tricks to create effects like depth of field, motion blur that will have to be re-thought for a stereo 3D environment. I am not even talking about the fact that stereo 3D requires working on twice as many pixels… Every internal Sony game developer is already looking hard at that, according to my sources.

Despite all the goodness (theworld cupdid look very goodwith Sony’s3D), pricing remains a primary concern for customers and Sony knows it. At this point, it simply hopes that buyers will be swayed by the quality of its products and the added-value of the content, especially after getting a hands-on demo.

Yet, many people have told me that they can’t imagine spending hundreds of dollars more for something that they will get for much less a couple years down the road – isn’t that true for all gadgets?

This is hard and risky work, but for a company like Sony, there is no other way. The company constantly needs to add value to their products, because if they play the low-price game, they will lose. But Sony wins, this could be huge for them as they hold the content, the hardware, and even a distribution platform – if you take the Playstation Network into account. This is simply too good to pass on.

Sony is not betting the farm on 3D, it merely tries to stay itself.

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