While all this is great talk and all, the realistic position is that High-Definition on the whole isn't quite being adopted quite as well as business' felt it would be.
Although yeah it's true that it is slowly becoming adopted, the only reason for that is because people purchasing new televisions have no other choice than a HD Flatscreen now; as CRT Televisions have now been completely phased out of the retail market.
The only place to get one now is second hand. So adoption rates are rising only due to this, as given the choice between a 20" Flatscreen HDTV and a 32" Widescreen CRT SDTV... people were choosing the larger screen they could watch movies on properly.
With DVD-Players now utilising embedded graphics processors from NVIDIA and ATI to provide much more chrisp picture quality; the quality difference to the adverage person between SD and HD formats are almost negleable.
Especially when you pay note that the adoption rate of 1080p/i over the 720p/i (well 1440x900 max in most cases but oddly not supported by this HD Revolution except PS3 right now if you count that as a valid HD Media Player) is extremely small.
Mainly because people don't stand there and checkout the picture quality, but rather go with what seems to them the better value for money. Shop assistants won't go the extra mile to try to get a customer to part with an extra £100-300 for better picture quality when they are guarenteed a sale with the cheaper set, especially given peoples income becoming more and more limited... and without the market demand the prices will not drop because mass production of such things on the same scale as the previous generation is small.
What makes things worse is HDMI itself scares people as everything they own prior to upgrading is in Composite AV (SCART) format. Something that looks identical no matter how much resolution you put in to it... maybe a little chrisper on a HDTV but realistically that's down to the integrated up-scaling chips.
Another consern is for these higher resolutions to make sense or appear much different is to purchase a larger set... again more money but also requiring more space that people often don't have. They're more often than not upgrading from 21-28" CRT; sure they have more room behind where it used to be, but often width-wise they don't want them taking up too much of the room.
Peoples living rooms and bedrooms aren't instantly going to increase in size simply because they bought a new TV. For example I actually had to trade in my 38" Widescreen 1080p HDTV for a 32" model (which didn't have a 1080p version available) simply because it didn't fit in the gap where I have my TV in my living room; and to have it fit it would've interfered with the couch we have in the gap near the window. While it would've been nice to have a big TV, I'm not gonna rearrange my entire living room to accomidate it as I would've been left with less overall space for guests.
Not to mention the only area large enough would've had everyone getting blinded requiring a set with a backlight to compensate with it being against the window. Again that would've cost extra...
There are a few people I know with similar issues when getting these new TVs often settling for smaller, or lower resolution sets because of cost and/or space. Not to mention a huge number of people I know don't have anything wrong with their current TV and see no reason to upgrade; this story is echoed quite often.
HD Formats are great and all, but realistically I just don't think it's as big a deal as the companies thought it would be. It's nice to now have a universal connection format that is used for all the devices the world over; but realistically makes no odds until more devices start to actually incorporate it more.
Yet the knock on effect is they won't see the point until the adoption rate is high enough to warrent mass production to keep costs down, or worry about releasing a product that isn't guarenteed to sell in declining economies. Something business' just aren't going to risk.
At the end of the HD-DVD vs BluRay war, I said at the time I don't see either out-performing DVD for a very long time; and that I saw Digital Content being the realistic successor to DVD. With each month that passes that is becoming more and more likely.
In-fact if we continue to have physical formats for things, which is likely given high-speed internet for everyone is still a pipedream... Actually while this might sound crazy, but what I honestly see happening over the next few years is everything moving to SD-Flash cards.
While you might be like "WTF?!", think about it like this. You can go to a store today and get a 16GB SD-Flash Card for £30... it has full support for all current protection methods and flexible enough for protection methods that might be deviced. The cost to create these cards is actually fairly small, thanks to the adoption of them with Cellphones, Cameras, PC, Wii and Playstation 3. Meaning they're being mass produced cheaply.
They're extremely safe from extreme weather condition, they can't get scratched and can be written and rewritten billions of times without degredation. Not to mention small enough to keep huge collections.
I can see download terminals appearing in video stores, etc... it'd be cheaper for rental places given they only need a box they could copy a film as many time as required; or not even have physical copies but just a terminal for you to rent on-the-fly. Same with games.
You get back home, then insert in your TV, Console or PC that then downloads to the HDD and runs the film, game or software. For those who still want a perminant physical copy they would be able to; but for those who just want the stuff they could be charged less because of no packing or such... simply the product downloaded.
Seriously, I reckon that's the direction of physical media. I mean SD-Flash also has transfer rates between that of DVD for low-quality to better than HDDs for high-quality. There's zero noise because of no moving parts.
I'm probably wrong, but realistically that seems to be where media is heading. A true digital solution.
