"Senior Sony Pictures executive confidently predict that Sony's rival Blu-Ray standard will dominate the market within 12 months.

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment president Benjamin Feingold fingered the PlayStation 3, which will sport a Blu-Ray drive, as a major factor that will drive the adoption of the standard.

"I think in 12 months it's going to be clear," he predicted. "The combination of Blu-Ray and PlayStation 3 machines is going to overwhelm any HD-DVD presence and all studios will have to support Blu-Ray."

Feingold's comments come after Toshiba was forced to admit that the first HD-DVD players and recorders will not launch until 2006, eliminating the market head-start which supporters of the standard had hoped to be able to create.

However, Toshiba still claims that HD-DVD will be a more popular standard as manufacturing costs for the discs are lower than they are for Blu-Ray - although Sony's rival standard boasts higher data (and hence video) capacity.

While PlayStation 3 will support Blu-Ray out of the box - a feature which some reports suggest could add as much as $100 to the manufacturing costs of the console - Microsoft has stuck with standard DVDs for Xbox 360, saying only that it may add a HD-DVD drive to a future version of the console."

I think the real advantage PS3 and Blu-Ray have over HD-DVD is that the PS3 will deliver the cheapest HiDef DVD format. If that is not enough of a incentive for movie houses, Sony always has another blue-ray technology that they can enter in the negotiations. The PSP UMD format could very easily be a bargaining piece to persaude said entities into using their formats.

The bigger audience will prevail, and with a track record of 90+ million current generation PS2's in the marketplace, I think Sony won't have too much resistance to using their standards. I will have more on this later.