Forecasting a 1992 general election victory for Neil Kinnock wasn’t a highlight. Neither was the attempt to persuade an uncle to buy a BSB “squarial” instead of a Sky dish in 1990.

Indeed, the nadir of my futurology career came even earlier, in 1989 when, having spent an entire school lunch hour listening to my Walkman, I placed the headphones over the ears of my best mate and remarked: “She’ll be the biggest singer in the world one day. Mark my words.”

The singer was Debbie Gibson. So when Warner Bros, the film studio, announced this week that it had plumped for Sony’s Blu-ray in preference to Toshiba’s HD DVD in the battle to become the standard format in the next-generation video disc market, I saw an opportunity for redemption. I would, I decided, try out both formats and predict how things would pan out.

However, after half an hour of alternately watching The Mummy Returns on a £249 HD DVD player and Behind Enemy Lines on a £399 Blu-ray machine in the Peter Jones department store, a problem transpired: there appeared to be no difference between the two formats.

Andrew Lim, the assistant demonstrating the gadgetry, must have sensed my befuddlement because he suddenly remarked: “To be honest, they’re pretty much the same. They run at the same resolution, carry the same audio. The only difference is that Blu-ray has more storage space and is more expensive to produce.”

An entire morning spent sifting through hundreds of articles on the subject didn’t help to divide the formats either.

If anything, Blu-ray and HD DVD began to appear even more indistinguishable in the light of the discovery that early Blu-ray discs will be limited to half their 50gb storage capacity, and the declaration of a stalemate a few months ago by Sony boss Sir Howard Stringer.

Unfortunately, “can’t decide” isn’t, technically, an opinion and as developing one was the point of the exercise, I’m throwing caution to the wind to make four predictive assertions regardless. The first is that the Financial Times’s John Kay was wrong when, in April 2006, he somewhat timidly remarked: “If you want to place a modest wager, I would put it on Toshiba.”

Things are different now and you could bet your house and family on Sony winning the format war. Blu-ray is not a massively more impressive product, but history has taught us that the best man does not necessarily win a standards battle: Betamax was better than VHS and Apple was better than Microsoft.

Moreover, this is a war that will be resolved by executives, not customers mooching around department stores. Blu-ray has a critical mass of studios backing it and that will drive others to line up behind the format.

However, and here comes the second forecast, despite Blu-ray’s imminent victory, decades from now there will still be some nerds banging on about the superiority of HD DVD.

Should you think this unlikely, I proffer this incredible fact from the Los Angeles Times: Sony abandoned its Betamax product line only in 2002. That’s six years ago. And some twenty years after it lost the war against VHS!

As you read this, there is probably someone somewhere watching Police Academy 6 on Betamax, just to make the point that it offers better picture quality than VHS.

Which brings me to my third forecast: none of the above will make a difference to many of us.

High-definition bores are hard to avoid: they corner us to prattle on about the difference between LCD and plasma, or 720p and 1080i. They claim the leap in technology is as significant as the switch from black and white to colour, and rave that new screens allow you to monitor Jonathan Ross’s blackheads from 50 yards away.

What these enthusiasts don’t realise is that most of us: (a) don’t want to see Wossy’s spots; (b) think standard DVDs offer good picture quality already; (c) don’t follow technological developments obsessively.

I’m thinking here of how only 28 per cent of people over the age of 65 have home internet access against a UK average of 57 per cent, and of my mother who has only just discovered the compact disc.

At the other end of the spectrum, I fear early adopters won’t care either as they are already, or will soon be, on the next big thing: digital downloads.

Indeed, my fourth bold prediction is that Blu-ray’s victory will be a hollow one. It is assumed that the winner will inherit a multibillion-dollar industry but Sony may actually struggle to recoup its development costs if the ultimate dream of couch potatoes comes true and high-definition movies are delivered directly into the living room.

The outcome of the format war could be another illustration of the “last gasp” phenomenon outlined by Daniel Snow in this month’s Harvard Business Review. Professor Snow observes that when superior technologies emerge, old ones don’t just fade away: “Their performance often leaps suddenly, thereby extending their lives and slowing the adoption of new technologies.”

It happened with sailing ships when steam-powered vessels were developed, with steel versus aluminium bicycle frames. The optical discs versus digital downloads battle could be another example. Sony should heed the warning that there is a danger in “mistaking the last gasp as sustainable improvement. This can lead companies to overestimate the prospects of their products, overinvest in trying to enhance them, and wait too long to switch to the new technology.”

In other words, Sony faces a paradox: the impending success of Blu-ray could be bad news for the company because it will distract it from the real task of developing digital download systems. Blu-ray might well turn out to be the worst thing that ever happened to the Japanese electronics company. Mark my words.

sathnam@thetimes.co.uk

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