From a strategic business standpoint, they will have a lot more to gain by winning blu-ray standards than they will with winning the PS3 gaming generation.

Video formats can last for a long time, much longer than a console generation, even if digital downloads take hold. There's just too many other regions that don't have access to high speed bandwidth and most places do not have the infrastructure for it for at least a decade.

They were so high off of the domination of the PS1 and PS2 that they didn't seriously take nintendo or MS to be a threat and so they were fine with the risk/reward structure.

The thing is that they can always regain dominance with the PS4 in a few years, you can't do that with HD format. And regardless of their performance, if you look at the records, the PS1 and PS2 didn't actually make Sony that much money compared to the size of the prize that the movie industry is offering.

Thats the main thing I dislike Sony for, they were willing to sacrifice the gaming industry by using it as a trojan horse to push yet another proprietary format upon the world.

Just imagine MS paying Sony royalties to put a Blu-Ray drive in the next Xbox, lol.

the posed question itself is okay... but nobody here has any idea just how much blu-ray can make... everybody just throwing arbitrary numbers around. it's levels upon levels of assumptions. this thread contains some of the most worthless "turd" i've read on vgchartz ever. worse than GBallZack threads.

anyhow, just venting my frustration when i'm reading some of these posts.

I'm absolutely with FishyJoe on this one.

No one has provided any real substantive data that gives us any indication how much money Sony stands to make off Blu Ray. Honestly, it's completely unclear. Keeping in mind they SHARE the patent rights with six other companies who founded the Blu Ray Disc Association:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc_Association

And that there are over 14 companies on the "Board of Directors" now, it's simply impossible to tell how the profits will be split, and how much total will be raked in, assuming everything goes as planned.

Last quarter, Sony lost 800 million dollars on video games. I strongly suspect that they don't stand to gain significantly mroe than that over the lifetime of a format (individually, I mean), but hey, it's all guesses.

I am tired, however, of seeing people defend the PS3's financially disastrous results defend by Blu Ray patents. WE REALLY DON'T KNOW HOW MUCH THESE ARE WORTH TO SONY. Stop implying these totally balance out the billions of dollars in losses accrued by the gaming department, because we simpy do not know.  

A naive question. Including Blu Ray in the ps3 had nowt to do with the hi def war. It was to do with Kuturagis mad dream of producing the perfect multi media device. Sony must've already lost $3billion on the ps3. Sonys divisions are extremely loose in terms of accountability which gave Kuturagi the chance to waste billions on R & D etc.

on paper it was probably such a fantastic plan, forcing blue ray ownership on every PS3 buyer and pushing the dev costs onto third parties due to the PS2 total dominance but I dont think anyone could have predicted that Nintendo were going to counter that with a fresh alternative thats designed to attract so many people that usually purchase Eye toy, Singstar etc.

Otherwise I think that the Ps3 would have also maintained dominance and when the current PS2 crowd decide to purchase a new system it may be too late for Sony now if the Wii's gap keeps growing as it is.

1--i have phios so i dont know what bandwith trouble is...but yeah i guess some people might have that trouble, but most people that are striving to have the cutting edge tec dont use dial up so...not to mention every day more cable is laid

2--look at the post above--you remove the band with problem and blammm--not to mention t would just take longer to download a movie

 3--not really, most video cards now have hardware to send signel over to tv---and all you would ned is a video card that can do HD graphics...so i dont see you point here

 4--this one i will admit could be a problem, but it will always be a problem for any type of digital media...that didnt stop music now did it?

 Bottom Line---in the field of tec there is no such thing--every day things change in ways we never saw--i mean look at the last 3 years and tell me there hasnt been major advances that have completly changed the industtry--i mean look at mp3's no one saw that comming but a few people

I have done absolutely no research into digital movie distribution, but it doesn't seem like that difficult of a problem.

How do on demand movies work anyways? Like when I was at my girlfriends, we wanted to watch a movie so we just picked one, and it started playing. There wasn't any bandwith problems or anything. Are these totally different concepts?

If someone released a product specifically for this sort of thing, a lot of these problems would be specifically addressed.

Also for #4, an easy solution would be to just have something similar to a steam account, where you buy the rights to the movie and you can delete/redownload whenever you want.

I don't know if that would open piracy issues, (sharing your accounts) but steam hasn't seen problems.  If they only allow one Output device to display a movie at a time, then it would motivate bill and his next door neighbor to have seperate accounts, so they dont have to worry if someone else is watching a movie (assuming they share accounts.) They could link access to a specific device as well,(another option to prevent account sharing), and if that device's hdd craps out, the service would keep track of what movies you have purchased under your account. 

I don't really see that many problems with the digital distribution of movies, but I think it would share all the same exact problems that Blu-Ray and other hi def formats do anyways. That being the techonlogically illiterate general population. Trying to figure out how to get movies to download, and to actually trust a system like that is just as bad as figuring out how to hook up a high def player to an hdtv with all the right cables and having all the right options set.

People are satisified with DVD and I think they will be for a very long time.

If they win the format war and everyone goes from dvd to blu-ray in 2-3 years then ofcourse, not only will sony be sucessful in brining blu-ray to home, they will be the richest and most valuable company.

They would make BILLIONS with blu-ray if all dvd people went on to blu-ray.

i would say between blu ray/HD DVD nad your DVD then dvd will still be in charge by 2010, i think 60-65% of the disc market would you call it? Either way the 80's were better!