For the 300-odd companies furiously scrambling for supremacy in the world’s living rooms, the biggest challenge in winning the Blu-ray v HD DVD “format war” has been persuading consumers to think of it as a war at all.

Three simple realities exist in this “war”. The first is that despite the excitable claims of both camps, there is not a huge amount to choose between them. It is clear that the world is pushing towards ever-higher-definition images. As such, a next-generation DVD format capable of storing more information and, therefore, higher-quality images is called for. Held up against either of the new format discs, the images on an existing DVD look decidedly shoddy.

Quality-wise, though, it is difficult to differentiate between HD DVD and Blu-ray. Certainly, there are technical differences between the two. HD DVD is cheaper to make and so are the machines that play them. Blu-ray is technically superior in almost every way, but for the moment there is not the content available to make this obvious to consumers.

The second, related problem is that the format war only properly becomes relevant when the television that the next-generation discs are viewed on is larger than 42 inches. Eventually, as panel prices of LCD and plasma TVs fall, that size will become more common in homes, but there is not the critical mass of owners of large televisions for the issue of image quality to matter.

Finally, in stark contrast with previous format battles, the war is being waged before a highly sophisticated consumer audience that has serious financial concerns. Consumers have learnt that, if they hold off long enough, they can let the companies bear the brunt of making a bad format decision, rather than risking it themselves.

The result of this trio of dampeners is that, with a fairly limited selection of movies available in each format, the war has fizzled. The longer the fizzle, the more the corporate players will lose financially and so the initiative in deciding the victor has been snatched from the consumers by the Hollywood studios, which lack the patience or stomach to watch us making up our minds.

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