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Video Games and the Hi-Def Format Wars
Pika the Mad writes "Reuters has a concise but interesting article up about how video games will help decide the format war between Blu-ray and HD DVD. According to industry analysts "What Sony and Microsoft decide to announce publicly or to dealers at E3 next week will be key." So this year's E3 could very well be a deciding factor in how you view your movie library for years to come."
I concur.
Frankly, HD-DVD and BluRay displays at such a high resolution, I can't imagine that half the people that buy HDTV sets can even see any actual quality difference between an HDTV version of a movie and a standard DVD version without buy a television so large that few if any can afford it. My eyes aren't that good. Hell, my TV isn't that good, and I don't want to and am not going to buy one until this one gets broken beyond repair (and there's a very good TV repair place near here, so that's not very likely).
Also, there's little actual advantage that I can see in the HD-DVD/BluRay over the DVD format, aside from a reduction in the number of discs needed for big movie sets (like the LotR special editions, TV series, etc) but that kind of economy isn't going to last very long. The content size will expand to fit the media. Video games used to be dwarfed by the capacity of CDs, now they're pushing the limits of multiple DVDs, multiple HD-DVD/BluRay will soon follow so that doesn't really solve the multiple disc problem permanently. DVD had very clear advantages over VHS. HD-DVD's advantages are not so clear.
The real determiners of the HD format wars will be the adult DVD producers.
Conventional wisdom is that adult DVD doesn't want high definition, as the 480-line output of standard definition production hides the imperfections in erotic actors' skin.