Ready for 3-D Web Video? Break Media Is Serving It Up Anyway

Sometimes marketers come late to a trend. Sometimes they show up early, panting and desperate to write checks.

Such is the case with 3-D, says Keith Richman, who is happy to help them out.* Richman’s Break Media, the dude-centric Web site network, is launching a 3-D Web video channel aimed at advertisers who want to connect themselves with anything 3-D right now. Oh, and people who want to watch 3-D Web video on their TVs and PCs, too.

How many of the latter group are there? Who knows. Can’t be that many, for the time being. But certain brands, like Dell’s (DELL) Alienware, which makes game-centric PCs, are happy to pay up for 3-D content, so Break is happy to make it for them. A sample:

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Richman says 3-D video is about 300 percent more expensive to make than run-of-the-mill Web video, because the equipment is expensive and the talent pool that knows how to use it is limited. Cameras for 3-D, at least, will get cheaper within the next few months, but this stuff will be pricey for some time.

If 3-D joins Laserdiscs and Betamax in the great technology graveyard in the sky, then that’s wasted money for Richman and his sponsors. But if he’s right, the payoff is something like the one that HDNet’s Mark Cuban got for betting early on that technology about five years ago: A big head start on something that everyone now takes for granted.

*I’m paraphrasing, of course–Richman is much too politic to describe marketers as “desperate.” I’m sure he said “enthusiastic” or something like that.