HappySqurriel on 04 October 2007
Many people cite the eventual adoption of HDTVs as a reason why the PS3 and/or Xbox 360 will see greater sales later in life and as a reason why the Wii will inevitably see lower sales. One thing I don’t think that these people consider is that simply owning a HDTV doesn’t ensure that you will be motivated to choose one of the HD consoles. In order for HDTV to be a big motivating factor:
- People will need to be fully aware of the quality level of the content that they're watching. For this to happen people will need to be exposed to a lot of HD signals (1080i, 720p and 1080p) on properly connected hardware; being that there has been resistance for most channels to move towards digital (480p) and the HD Movies are not taking off at lightning speed I expect that this condition will occur late in this generation (after 2010)
- People will need to actively seek out High Definition. There are (currently) no strong statistics but it has been suggested that a large portion of HDTVs have been bought over the past couple of years because they were large screen flat pannel displays and their purchase had little to do with their resolution; the supporting evidence to this is that digital cable (and in particular HD-Digital cable) has not been increasing at the same rate as HDTV sales.
- People will need to reject standard definition signals. As long as people keep watching movies on DVD or television at 480p (or worse) the lower resolution of the Wii will not be an issue.
