Clearly wanting to press the point home, he continued, “Moving towards the high definition era, there will be one standard. There’s not going to be NTSC or PAL, so you know there’s no commercial or any other reason that that’s been done in the past except because of standards in different countries. I think you’ll see more and more single zone situations as high definition takes on.” That’s a bold prediction, we must say. After Sony’s recent legal action against Lik-sang for importing consoles into Europe, one would have to expect that there was some rather important commercial implications regarding segmenting console sales into regions.
Fortunately, Ephraim explained his reasoning. “The movie industry doesn’t [intend to get rid of region coding] but we don’t control that, that’s the movie industry and that’s mainly because theatrical releases come out at different times. Movies come out in the US, as you know, right away and they have to be translated into 15 languages in Europe, so if a movie came out in the US and went to DVD very quickly, it would ruin theatrical business around the world. So that’s the movie thing, but the games thing has more technical standards on television and I think we’ll see less and less of that as technology changes.” Even though those are words that are sure to make many importers very happy, we have to admit that it doesn’t seem to fit in with Sony’s strategy so far.
Nintendo and Microsoft’s representatives on the panel declined to make a comment in the issue.
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