While royalties may indeed add to Billions of Dollars per year for CDs, DVDs, and eventually Blu Ray, the point is that NO ONE COMPANY really benefits substantially.

If it is a consortium, the royalties get all split up, not just to the companies, but also different patent holders of different parts of the technology.

If you look up the DVD "inventors", (Sony is also one of them), you can see that not all companies that are part of the consortium are necessarily flush with cash from all the royalties collected.

(Googled: Who invented DVD - Link: http://www.allformp3.com/dvd-faqs/61.htm)

So ultimately, the hardware will decide if Sony (in this example) will ultimately benefit from widespread adoption of Blu Ray.

The movies department not so much, as content will generally move to whatever the dominant media is at any specific point in time.

@Happy Squirrel

I agree. Which is exactly the point I was trying to make in the original post.

Blu Ray (or any new media) is for Sony (in this case) to help drive hardware/electronics sales, being as they are a hardware company, not necessarily for the royalties. Though of course, those help.

Consortiums are necessary (and by definition, no one company benefits disproportionately) to spread out the R&D costs and to hopefully standardize the media.

You do realize that graph includes all 6 million or so Europeon PS3's right? While the DVD number likely did not include PS2s?

Also it appears they are counting PS3 games as well when it comes to blue-ray revenue.

It's all a corporate shellgame. As much as you've seen Sony and Microsoft PR spin you think you'd know better.

Take out at least the 60% of people who don't use their PS3's for blu-ray (europe usually behind America in such matters) and it's well behind where DVD was (since the vast majority of blu-ray players are PS3s.

Phillips made like a billion a year on their DVD royalties.  Or maybe that was Toshiba.

Sony owns about 30% of Blu-ray.  I wouldn't disregard 30%.

I understand that royalties do have some effect.

But even if you look at Philips at a cursory glance, they swing between billions in profits and billions in losses - more likely due to the cyclical nature of semiconductors.

While Blu-Ray may eventually be profitable for Sony, my main contention is that it is not the most important part of the business. For a company like Sony, it will not make or break them, whether they get a billion here or there from royalties.

Whereas if their electronics division suddenly bleed money like crazy, they will be in serious trouble.

Generally, all many electronics companies have a hand in whatever new media standard is set anyway - so they are more or less on equal footing.

Amazing , do you have a source for that SSJ if you woudln't mind ?

Not really. It's counting all PS3s, PCs with blu-ray drives, blu-ray players, blu-ray movies, anything on a blu-ray disc(like PS3 games) etc.

It was supposed to make a lot more projected wise....

What he links mentioend it.