A format war in consumer electronics is like the US presidential primaries: victory requires momentum. That is certainly the case with high definition DVDs. Consumers are indifferent between the Blu-ray standard championed by Sony and Toshiba’s HD-DVD – they are similar in capability if not in design – but they do not want to buy the loser and find it obsolete within a year. It now looks, however, as if this war has been won.

In DVDs, the critical momentum-building contests are not Iowa and New Hampshire, but Paramount, Warner Brothers and 20th Century Fox. Without their support there are no DVDs to play. Warner’s announcement that, henceforth, its high definition releases will be exclusive to Blu-ray means that the Sony format is now backed by a majority of Hollywood’s players.

To the victor will go the spoils. The Blu-ray consortium will earn royalties on every drive and disc sold that uses their technology. Once their dominance is established, they may even be able to put the price of Blu-ray up: format wars are bitterly fought because, in the end, the winner is left with a monopoly. For Sony, loser of the most famous format war of all with its Betamax video tape, that victory will be especially sweet.

Even a Blu-ray triumph, however, will leave the industry worse off than if there had been no such battle at all. First, the costs of Blu-ray’s fight for market share will probably be recouped through higher fees, while HD-DVD’s backers have lost a fortune. Second, and more important, consumer acceptance and uptake of high capacity DVDs has suffered a setback.

That matters because the new discs are a marginal technology anyway. Basic DVD only became a mass market technology relatively recently and consumers may not be willing to pay again for a sharper picture and more storage space. If the industry is to promote new standards it must be united.

Barring surprises, or a few billion dollars in sweeteners for the Hollywood studios, HD-DVD has lost and Blu-ray has won. But rather than another video cassette or DVD, the industry may have found another MiniDisc. That format was a detour on music’s route from cassette to compact disc. Blu-ray, too, may be but a footnote to video’s move to downloads from today’s DVDs.