Beyond what is on your cable and or coming down from the bird is a growing list of sexy titles on both Blu-ray and HD DVD. The Matrix is headed to store shelves soon. The James Bond thriller Casino Royale has set sales records with over 100,000 units shipped, thus giving more and more reasons for people to pop for an HD disc player to go along with that flat HDTV. When prices drop even more this holiday season, look for both formats to get a major boost, considering how many millions of HDTV sets are installed currently in the market place. At this stage, if you want to see what your 1080p set can really do, you need HD DVD or Blu-ray or both. Cable and satellite are HD, but not “as HD” as the two disc formats.

Another source for HD is video games. Both the Gen X and Gen Y audience seem drawn to the amazingly complex, realistic and exciting world of gaming. Playstation 3, based on Blu-ray, was the story of Christmas 2006. Xbox has games that are also in very high resolutions. Recent reports show software sales for video games up over 33 percent year to date for the first quarter of 2007 vs. the same period in 2006. This is incredible growth in a segment that is relatively new to the consumer electronics market, but again, it is an HD format.

“Always Fight the New Technology” Record Industry Motto (1890 to Present)
It’s easy to see why the world of HD video is booming. Content is king and the content is getting so much better at such a fast pace that it is suckering in everyone from the average NASCAR fan to the guy with the Ferrari F430 Spyder in the garage to plunk down their credit cards for an investment. But in the music business, things couldn’t be worse. The know-it-all executives have taken a business that sold 33 billion dollars in compact discs in the early 1990s and parlayed that into about nine billion per year in domestic CD sales by 2006 – an unimpressive development, to be polite.

Historically, the music business has fought all new technologies. The LP was going to kill off the sheet music business, they cried. The DAT was going to allow everyone to copy CDs, so they killed that format off to protect the goose that laid the golden egg. And fear of people recording and or downloading ultra-huge 5.1 audio files from SACD and DVD-Audio made it necessary to connect both formats’ expensive players exclusively via analog connections – connections that required in many cases not just a $1,000 new player, but an even more expensive receiver or preamp and $200 in audio cables, as well as a degree in Electrical Engineering to figure out how to make a B-list Steely Dan record come out of your rear speakers. Consumers voted enthusiastically “no” with their economic ballots at the one pathetic attempt the record industry made at selling their lamest titles at a higher resolution level, thanks to fear of files being stolen. When were these industry leaders going to get scared that people might not care about the entertainment they are selling at any resolution?