Interesting Graph Re: SD and HD Media Consumption

Here's a fascinating graph from the University of California San-Diego which shows how people consume data (click to embiggen).  Notice how many users there are of SD TV.

Totaling all SD sources, you reach the astounding sum of 169 million users of standard definition media.  Now, certainly there's some overlap of people who watch TV in HD, but some programs are in SD.  Just subtracting the number of HD users from SD users, you come to the number of 46.5 million users of ONLY standard definition services.  There are probably also a group of people who use nothing BUT HD media, but that's probably a small number.  If I'm interpreting this information correctly, that means that there are a lot of people who have no problem with SD so they mix it with HD and a large group of people who have no interest in HD services.

What does that mean, and why am I posting it here?  Well, for most of us tech-heads, we're adamant that HD is the way to go and that Nintendo MUST release an HD version of their system.  In reality, while that's a nice idea, it's not imperative.  There's a huge section of the population that neither has nor cares about HD media, as evidenced by cold, hard statistics.

Second, Sony and Microsoft are aiming at the small subset that does, and while they've carved a niche there they haven't run away with the console race.  Nintendo, however, has aimed at the squishy belly where there are 253 million users of DVD media.  They're successful.

This all means a lot, and maybe I'll dissect it later on.  Suffice to say, this teaches us an awful lot about how games are viewed by the public at large, and what drives success in the gaming world.