Comcast's holiday show is a breakout in 3-D

Brian L. Roberts and dozens of Comcast Corp. employees yesterday donned far-out 3-D glasses to watch the new Christmas show on the giant video wall in the lobby of the company's building.

You can call it Holiday Christmas Show 2.0.

Comcast's show in 2008 - the first season in which the company was in the new skyscraper - drew a crowd of 80,000 to the Comcast Center lobby on the 1700 block of JFK Boulevard, just west of City Hall.

This year's updated 19-minute video is being shown in 3-D on the video wall. Comcast, the cable giant with the tallest building between New York and Chicago, has ordered 100,000 3-D glasses and they will be distributed free by folks in white gloves and red satchels. Anybody, including passersby, who would like to watch the video show gets a pair - and it's recommended that viewers use them.

Comcast will play the 3-D video at the top of the hour between 10 in the morning and 8 in the evening. The first day of viewing will be Thanksgiving and the last on New Year's Day. During weekdays, Comcast will not show the video at 5 p.m. because of the rush of employees departing the Comcast Center.

David Niles, a New York film producer who created the first holiday video and updated it this year with 3-D special effects, said the novelty of the 3-D video is that it's being shown in daylight. Most 3-D films are shown in the dark because of the need for "visual cues" for a sense of depth, Niles said.

Niles was careful to create emotional "peaks and valleys" with the video, he said, because "with 19 minutes of 3-D you can get a little queasy." Without the 3-D glasses, he added, the video "looks way too bright."

The video contains a segment with basketball star Shaquille O'Neal asking for people to contribute $5 to the United Way to help fight hunger. O'Neal has appeared in Comcast advertisements this year with economist and TV personality Ben Stein.

There are "legacy segments" from last year's holiday video show and four or five new segments, Niles said.

The video was shown once yesterday at 10:30 a.m. to kick off the holiday season, and it was replayed at noon.

Erik Leenars, 20, a hotel-management employee visiting Philadelphia from New York, saw the giant Comcast screen and entered the lobby and grabbed some 3-D glasses.

"You feel like you're in the ride," he said of Santa's sleigh.