Today My Own Blog Laziness Bites Me In The Ass.

Right. Now, you've heard me expound on several occasions about the pitiful situation surrounding the "format war," HDTV in general, and the reason consumers aren't buying into it.

But about 2 months ago, I collected a few articles with which I intended to make a prognostication: within 6 months, HD-DVD would bite the big one, and Blu-Ray would rule the roost.

I was being optimistic. Despite the fact that time limitations just never have seemed to let me get around to actually WRITING my blog post about this, events bore out my conclusions nonetheless; Toshiba announced today that HD-DVD is as dead as a dodo bird.

Since there's no need for foretelling, a lot of my blathering can be cut short, so here goes a very compressed version of what I had intended originally to be a much longer post:

First, Sony made the wise though painful choice of including a Blu-Ray player in the PlayStation 3. This is several factors rolled into one.

Toshiba makes - ONLY - a stand-alone box. They have an agreement with Microsoft to make a standalone HD-DVD attachment for the XBOX360, but here's the thing: people tend to NOT buy peripherals that cost as much as the console. They never have, they never will.

Additionally, comes one factor that's holding back HDTV in general: the only place it makes THAT much of a clear, obvious difference in quality - is in gaming. When you're playing a video game, having triple the resolution makes a huge, staggering, immense difference in the quality and realism of what you can see on-screen. When you're watching a movie, not so much. It's better, sure, but is it "Go buy a new TV and spend $800 on it just to see this" good? Not for most people. But in gaming, it sure as hell is.

So, The PlayStation 3. Sony willingly falls on its sword as far as this generation of game consoles is concerned - let there be no mistake, with sales of nearly 6 times as many systems, the Wii from Nintendo is the clear and obvious winner this time around - in exchange for defeating Toshiba.

Make no mistake, that was Sony's goal with the PS3. Let me explain.

HDTV is an emergent technology. This means that it's not finalized into its "standardized" form yet; the only people using it to a significant extent are early adopters who buy EVERYTHING new and spiffy; it has not yet broken into the market sufficiently to let mass production cause a major price drop.

But in the next 10 years, HDTV is going to be the standard. No ifs, ands, or buts about it; Hollywood has managed to convince Congress to pass laws mandating digital broadcasting specifically for the purpose of forcing Joe Schmoe to buy an HDTV. YOU WILL HAVE AN HDTV IN THE NEXT FEW YEARS, OR YOU WILL NOT WATCH TV.

So, this is where the markets - and the huge, staggering amounts of money - are going. Sony knows this; so, knowing they were going to have to set the price point so high that sales would be - to put it mildly - disappointing, they stuffed a Blu-Ray player into the PS3. This ultimately is what brought HD-DVD, and the format war, to an end.

You see, gamers outnumber early adopters roughly 100,000 or so to 1. Even recognizing that there are way more poor gamers than rich ones, rich gamers outnumber early adopters about 10 to 1.

Which explains why there are 10.1 million PS3's - complete with movie-compatible Blu-Ray player - on the street - and thus far only 1 million or so Toshiba HD-DVD players. This, of course, doesn't count the sales of standalone Blu-Ray players; that's just the numbers for the PS3.

So, Sony has simply outsold their competitor to the point where the movie companies have to put movies on BR-DVD, because they're actually trying to SELL their product, and Toshiba can't push enough of their product to justify the investment.

Also, there's another factor quietly at play behind the scenes, and if Sony can ever get third-party developers off their butts, PS3 sales are going to take off. That factor is FILE SIZES. As games get more advanced, file size and storage space becomes more important. Graphics files don't compress well; they take up a lot of room. Which means that the more graphically stunning a game is, the more room it takes - storage-wise - to do it. DVD, frankly, has only hit its limit for storage for gaming; for movies it's perfectly adequate. I've certainly never heard anyone complain about how pixilated and boxy their DVD movies look; for movies DVD is fine.

But DVD only goes up to about 10 gigabytes before it simply runs out of space, even with dual-layer writing schemes. Blu-Ray, on the other hand, goes up to 50 gigabytes, or thereabouts; much more capacious. Which allows game developers to really show off, because they have the storage capacity to tell epic storylines.

The XBOX360, it appears, will never possess that capacity, and neither will the Wii. I expect, frankly, the Wii will continue its massive sales numbers, because it has TOTAL backward compatibility, including literally thousands and thousands of downloadable games from literally 5 game systems or so - the NES, SNES, Genesis, TG-16, and N64 titles are all downloadable, while Gamecube games can simply play natively - a tremendous library of games, most of them for very, very low prices. That combined with its already low price point makes the Wii a long-term winner for Nintendo.

But make no mistake, the real winner in this generation is Sony. They've eliminated a competing technology - in the process of which, giving Microsoft a SERIOUS screwing - opened the horizons for game development far beyond what we've seen before, and positioned themselves for, a decade or so down the road, the PlayStation 4, with whatever features it will have.

Now if only these goddamn geniuses could get Hollywood to stop fucking around with the HDMI standards and get one, final, definitive copy protection standard for HDTV, so that I could buy one without being afraid they'd make a decision a week later and render my new TV into a brick.