2. The Music Industry Has Abandoned You. It’s true. After decades of leaning on terrestrial radio and MTV for free advertising, the music business has given up on selling the best available sound quality due to fears that you might copy it. In fact, they are perfectly okay with reverting their business model back to the mid-1950s, when they only sold singles. No wonder their domestic sales have shrunk from over 30 billion dollars per year to about 11 billion per year today. The cause of the roll off in sales isn’t Napster, as each and every know-it-all music executive will swear to you. It is the fact that the CD isn’t worth the money it costs. If you have hopes of ever getting the incredible audio potential of Blu-ray and/or HD-DVD, you need to be considering a player. With 50 megabytes of storage, a 24-192 stereo track and any number of compressed and uncompressed 5.1 surround sound versions of an album fit easily on a disc. How do HD versions of music videos, concerts and ultra-high-resolution still photos sound to you? Trust me, people – the music executives need you to clobber them over the head with support for high-res formats or they will let Hollywood make all of the money.

3. Compressed Video on DVD Looks Like Crap. Even with the best video scalers, DVD video simply cannot compete with the quality of HD video at 1080i. Compression is compression. In a recent comparison I made of Blu-ray vs. DVD video, I could clearly see the difference between DVD and Blu-ray. DVD looked like watching a movie through someone else’s glasses. Blu-ray looked like you were watching it as a bystander on the set.

4. Your HDTV is Hungry for New Content. On any given night, your HDTV has a number of HD options to choose from. On the weekend, the major HDTV sporting events can be stunning to watch. On a weeknight, the pickings get much slimmer. Sports in standard definition are hard to watch once you have tasted the sweet nectar of HDTV sports live. While you can still see some of the grain of the film on some HDTV transfers to HD disc formats, it is still an awakening when you compare an HD disc to a DVD. You can learn to live with a little grain on “Apollo 13” in comparison to the cloudiness you see on 480p DVDs, even those scaled to 1080p.

5. Without Players Being Sold, Studios Are Less Likely To Release Their Vast Catalogues. Sony Pictures alone has over 3,000 movies mastered in 1080p, with most in some format of surround sound. Add to that another 2,000 TV shows ready to go in the same format and you can see from one Hollywood studio alone the volume of titles that could be on the street in a matter of a year or two. With no players sold, the studio will look to sell their HD movies to Starz and HBO instead of selling product directly to you.