Bluetooth, the Microsoft Blue Monster and of course Blu-ray are all in fashion now in the tech world . . . or at least that's what a considerable amount of marketing is trying to tell us.

Sony, owner of the high definition Blu-ray format, wants us to believe that their format is the best format to watch movies and media content on and is investing heavily to ensure this.

Sony has competition from Toshiba and NEC, which are vigorously pushing their own HD DVD high definition format. Right now consumers are in the middle as the two sides fight yet another format war to become the standard in every home in the world.

However, they have forgotten to ask consumers if they want to move away from traditional DVDs to higher definition formats in the first place. If they did ask, they might not get a positive answer.

When considering how to get their format into the family room, both groups seemed to think it would be via next generation game consoles. As a result Sony has tried . . . and is still trying . . . to force mass adoption by including a Blu-ray player in their next generation games console, the Playstation 3, while the HD DVD format is sold as an ugly external add on to the XBox 360.

Including a blu-ray player in the Playstation 3 has meant the console retails for around 630. Judging by the catastrophically poor sales, consumers are not willing to fork out such high prices to get higher definition games and movies. Sales for the external HD DVD drive for the XBox have also been dismal. Moreover, while XBox 360 sales did quite well to start with, they are now slowing down considerably. Compare this to the bare bones Nintendo Wii, which doesn't offer any impressive media capabilities but is clobbering Sony and Microsoft when it comes to the number of units of consoles being sold.

If high definition media is not the killer application to get into the family room, then what is? Perhaps it's time? Look at Sky News and the BBC News coverage during the recent floodings in the UK. They didn't care about whether the feeds into their news centres were high quality of not. They solicited and used video camera, mobile phone and even webcam footage, yet their audiences did not tune out.

Instead they stayed tuned in for longer.

The current generation of buyers will happily sacrifice quality in exchange for fresh content. We are the generation which still remembers dodgy radio and TV signals and sellotaping homemade antennae to the walls so we could tune into Coronation Street . . . not to mention car radio aerials made from coat hangers.

The newer generations are well used to choppy webcam conversations, jumpy Skype voice calls and mobile phone conversations that zone in and out.

We have brains that fill in the gaps, much the same way we do when reading a book and building our audio and visual worlds around just text.

We don't mind sub-quality small pictures and Sony, of all companies, should have realised this themselves since the tiny-but-powerful Sony Video Walkman enables anyone to move their movies and pictures over to a device which has a screen the same size as a mobile phone screen.

Generation "right now" is happy with this.