One last point.
We're stacking up against the right edge, time to get outta here. But one thing you said cried out for comment because it wraps it up with a bow:
Right now the entire concept of intellectual property is treading a tightrope as we enter an era where mass duplication of even complex works like movies is becoming almost effortless. When movie copyrights were first issued, the technology to copy a film even once required a photo studio and major equipment. Now, with the push of a button, it can be copied millions of times with the only limit being bandwidth.
Yep, there goes the law of supply-and-demand. This is one of those edge cases I've theorized about, where the system goes nonlinear when one of its parameters goes to infinity or zero. Digital duplication is essentially cost-free, and has only capital setup costs (continuously being driven down), and so it keeps bumping up against the singularity. The push for expansive intellectual property laws is an attempt to shore up a marketplace differential that's in freefall; in plainer terms, shoring up demand in the face of infinite supply through an artificial monopoly enforced only by laws and not the marketplace.
One reason to adopt an HD format has nothing to do with technical merits--it would render a generation of duplication technology obsolete and allow the manufacturers to temporarily pull ahead. That thumping you hear is the sound of them bumping their heads up against the digital singularity with demented regularity. Eventually they'll lose consciousness and digital will win. Out of the wreckage we'll surely see a radically-changed economic regime that accommodates technological reality. Our 19th century intellectual property system has become nonfunctional.