Radio 5Live admits 3D commentary experiment was a mistake

BBC RADIO 5Live has admitted that its introduction of three-dimensional coverage wasn’t as successful as expected after receiving hundreds of complaints from angry listeners.

The station’s first ever 3D commentary of Saturday’s Manchester United v Chelsea match was criticised in emails to the BBC which complained that Alan Green was “overly concerned with distance” and that the coverage in general was “depth-of-field heavy”.

After an estimated £10m of investment, 5Live debuted its 3D coverage last weekend, making it available to listeners who had special headphones. Those wearing ‘3Dmuffs’ could hear the game in three dimensions, with each action described with a reference to how close or far away it was from the commentary box.

Listener Duncan Robertson said: “I was looking forward to the experience of entering the third dimension but it took 23 minutes for Alan Green to describe the kick off.

“He went into far too much detail about where every player was standing in relation to one another and individual members of the crowd. By the time he was speculating about whether he could see the Trafford Centre in the distance he’d missed the first goal.”

BBC spokesman Grant Stant said: “We are disappointed that our 3D commentary wasn’t popular with some of our listeners, including those near, quite near or even a long way away.”

5Live has been working on the extension of its coverage to the third dimension for several years after noticing that teams are generally only described as “kicking from left to right”, with no reference to their movements near and far at the same time.

Though traditional 2D coverage is seen as stale by many radio futurologists it is widely considered to be a vast improvement to one-dimensional pre-war commentary, which was said to lack character.

This week’s controversy looks likely to delay the corporation’s plans to move in to 4D coverage in time for the Olympics. Mike Ingham among others has long been of the opinion that fourth dimensional time travel would be a great chance to make the game more popular to a Saturday evening audience.

Published April 5, 2010

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