When the film The Jazz Singer opened in 1927 as the first full-length ‘talkie’, not many people regarded dialogue in a movie as a gimmick. For the most part it was seen, quite reasonably by cinema audiences, as revolutionary.

When television arrived in the 1930s, few dismissed it as merely a gimmicky form of radio – it was plainly an important advance in entertainment. The same could be said of colour TV a few decades later; only a serious diehard could have thought black-and-white was preferable.

What, then, of 3D TV, which in the wake of the sudden re-emergence of 3D cinema over the past couple of years, is the big new thing in television? Is it a fad that will never capture a mass market? Or is it more on a par with the introduction of colour: a genuine advance that will one day become ubiquitous?

The TV and entertainment industries say, with billions of dollars to back them up, that 3D is the future. At the recent giant IFA consumer electronics fair in Berlin, massive, showy 3D TV demonstrations drowned out everything else. This was despite the fact that an equally revolutionary innovation in TV – delivery by internet – was quietly on display here and there.

Maybe internet TV – by which standard broadcast channels, cable channels and entertainment from websites such as YouTube and the BBC iPlayer can be viewed on the TV screen in your living room – will be next year’s big thing.

So why has 3D arrived with the kind of bang that’s going to go on reverberating every time you enter an electronics store from now on? It is, after all, far from the first time 3D has been introduced as an entertainment medium; it has appeared sporadically in cinemas, and later in TV trials, for 100 years or more.

The techie answer is that the processors in televisions (and cinema projectors too) have only just reached a speed whereby smooth 3D footage can be shown without losing too much colour or brightness. The more complex economic reasons, however, are twofold.

Firstly, the cinema industry desperately needs a boost. For many, the attraction of going out and paying a lot of money to see a film on a cinema screen is fading, now that download services and home cinema offer a convenient alternative.

The second impetus is that it makes piracy harder. The main vehicle for 3D films in the near future won’t be the cinema but 3D Blu-ray discs. And while standard Blu-ray is just about within the competence of the more talented DVD counterfeiters, 3D is thought to require too much expensive equipment and skill.

But what of the 3D viewing experience? Isn’t it the case that film and TV directors have long been desperate for it as an aid to their creativity?

No, it isn’t. In fact most of what we’ve seen in the post-Avatar wave of 3D films has struck many viewers as contrived, gimmicky and strictly optional when it comes to a story’s emotional effectiveness. Directors reportedly don’t love it. Many film critics despise it.

And the public? Interesting question. For the next several years, it will be impossible to watch 3D TV without glasses, either the cheap plastic kind or the expensive electronic models. This is a major barrier, and one that big TV manufacturers and broadcasters with 3D channels – such as Cablevision and ESPN in the US, Sky in the UK and Korea Digital Satellite Broadcasting – seem loath to confront.

Think of how hard it is to keep a remote control in one place and working; extrapolate out from that the complication of having to keep track of several pairs of 3D glasses, without which your new highly expensive TV is useless.

From my own research, most people with a slight interest in having 3D at home (and there aren’t many) are peripherally aware that spectacle-free 3D screens are coming up and tend to say they will wait for them.

For now, I suspect the terms ‘3D’ and ‘gimmick’ will remain inextricably linked. A shame, because the technology is good.