High-def media?

High-def media to dominate home video market by 2012

I'm certainly in no rush to go out and spend several hundread for the priveledge of perhaps watching movies I've already seen with more pixels. But I have no garuntee that I will actually be able to watch them. Does my less than year-old HDTV at home have HDCP? Certainly my older one upstairs doesnt. 540p, that's basically DVD resolution, certainly it's not worth buying a ~$500-$1000 DVD player for a format that may or may not exist in several years to watch overpriced movies I already own, and can already watch on my 50" TV.

It's also not clear to me if I can watch a HD-DVD or Blu-Ray disc at full 1080p on my laptop, wer e I to get a drive for one of them. My understanding (and it might very well be wrong by this point) is that the high-def drives just allow the writing to and reading data (not movies) from high-def discs.

Add to all that the fact that most people still don't have any form of HDTV, and many don't care about image quality, just size, if anything, and I don't expect to see people shelling out ~$50 per movie after investing in a high-def player (or PS3).

I hope that at some point the MPAA etc (and the hardware/software developers they've bullied) realize they're just cheating Joe Consumer. Ways will always be found around copy protection, and it will be the people who don't care enough/don't spend hours per day reading /. etc that won't be able to figure out why they're 1080p movie in their Blu-Ray/HD-DVD player isn't sending a 1080p signal to their expensive 1080p HDTV. Perhaps they'll call up the manufacturer of one of the devices and ask about this. They will likely not be happy that the down-sampling is, in fact, an intended feature of their hardware.