To most, the recent format war was boring, unnecessary and hyped out of all proportion to the number of people who actually cared. DVDs were fine, no one even had HD tellies, and the thought of shelling out what were then £400+ prices for what could soon become obsolete understandably put off, well, everybody except the movie studios.

When the PlayStation 3 arrived with a Blu-ray drive there was only going to be one winner, and HD-DVD duly succumbed as the studios deserted it. With HDTV sales booming, what should have been the turning point for Blu-ray adoption ended up making practically no difference to the take-up rate, and while the studios are so quick to make excuses that’s entirely their own fault.

You could go into the lack of advertising until relatively recently, or the high cost of the players; but the biggest mistake the studios made was to break the golden rule of launching a new format: they didn’t bother releasing any good films.

This seemingly obvious rule didn’t enter Sony’s thinking as the first launch titles were announced back in 2006. Hitch, 50 First Dates, House of Flying Daggers, UnderWorld Evolution, xXx, The Fifth Element – any of those get you itching to stump up £400? Nope, me neither.

With these and the next few rounds of releases, Sony seemed most intent on releasing films several years old, and getting the family market interested – which was never going to work at early adopter prices. Most of the first wave of titles were just rushed, feature-free HD conversions of older films, which isn’t likely to tempt people who already own the DVD, especially as upscaling DVD players are so common now.

I bring all of this up because Blu-ray has at last been growing of late, with Iron Man and several other films garnering strong, if not stellar, sales figures. It’s been getting closer to the tipping point, just a nudge away from entering the mainstream consciousness – but it still needed its one killer app.

Then this week The Dark Knight was released on Blu-ray. It’s a film so perfectly suited to HD that its release was a no-brainer, but I think even Sony has been surprised by how well it’s sold: a hefty 1.7m Blu-ray copies, or up to 30% of the all-formats total - with 600,000 on the first day alone.

It’s no great surprise that this well-made Blu-ray of an absolutely stunning film - complete with iMax segments for the biggest scenes – has smashed the records to become the format’s first must-have title. What is surprising is that it’s taken the studios so long to realise we’re not mugs, we won’t just shell out money for whatever tat they put out there because we don’t know any better.

Far from being reluctant to adopt because we’re idiots who don’t know anything about technology, as the studios’ approach until recently has implied, it seems the public has just been waiting politely for the big studios to, you know, take the time and effort to make a good film into a good Blu-ray package. Hardly rocket science, Sony.

Like Napster and every other file sharing service since, BitTorrent has altered (some would say scarred) the digital landscape immensely. I’m not going to go into the legalities here – we all know people who use it, a noble few for genuine legal file sharing, vastly more for getting the latest Coldplay album without having to shell out for it (I’ve heard it, I can sympathise).

It’s part cause and part by-product of the fact that the Internet has hugely magnified the hype and speculation around new albums, movies and games, to the extent where we often know far more than we need to about something before we experience it.

Simon over at fanboy site Den Of Geek makes the point well here, with even seemingly innocent Facebook walls proving a minefield before a much anticipated film release. I can understand this to a certain extent – I read previews and speculate about films more than is really healthy. But I stop there.

The people I simply won’t ever understand are those seemingly intent on deliberately ruining their own enjoyment of the thing they’re so desperate to get hold of. I’m talking about the pre-release hounds, feeding on dodgy leaked movies and unfinalised games. Why? Just, why?

There’s an interesting interview here with SCEE President David Reeves, in which he drops his guard for a moment and comments honestly about the scourge of BitTorrent, particularly with regard to a company like Sony which often staggers releases across different regions. I quote:

“We are a PAL market and we are going to do it in PAL and we are going to do it properly, you can wait for it and you can have it in good quality, you know you can get the stuff from Bittorrent if you want to and download PSP games, it’s up to you.”

Aside from the fact that it’s so refreshing to hear a high-level Sony executive acknowledging that people are going to use BitTorrent and there ain’t much anyone can do about it, it’s the tone of his quote that really hit home.

In essence he’s saying, yes you can download the dodgy leaked version before it’s ready, but why on Earth would you want to? If you’ve waited so expectantly for a game or movie that’s going to knock your socks off, why don’t you want to savour it in all its glory, rather than seeing it as filmed by a bloke in the back row with a handycam?

A quick check of one popular torrent portal gives a depressing chart of the current top searches, with cracked copies of Wanted, the new Mummy film, Hancock, and even PSP games – the subject of Reeves’ resigned comments. But the worst is at number three.

Why why why oh why would anyone in their right mind wait three long and tense years for The Dark Knight to finally arrive – a film so mindblowingly perfect that scenes are still hurtling round my head days after witnessing it – only to download a dodgy copy to watch on a laptop? Whether it has the back of someone’s head in view for the duration is irrelevant – I doubt its $180 million budget was spent to be watched at 1,280 x 800 while you’re on the lav.

I can just about begin to understand some of the reasons behind it. Yes, the cinema is increasingly expensive, and bafflingly few people seem capable of holding their bladder for two and a half hours these days. And games that arrive across the pond months before they do so here can be infuriating when reviews are gushing with praise.

But the popular argument that these people then go on to buy a ticket or a copy of the DVD upon release just doesn’t cut it for me. You only get one first time. Rewatching a film when it then arrives in the cinema won’t let you unlearn the plot twists, and you’ll never get the same exhileration as the first time you sat in a crowded cinema and saw Batman turn his [SPOILER REMOVED] into a [SPOILER REMOVED] before [SPOILER REMOVED] into [SPOILER REMOVED] all in glorious HD. (See, I’m better than that.)

It’s like watching Match of the Day when you already know the results – you may as well just fast-forward to the goals.

But it’s human nature that some people would rather be the one to spoil the plot twists for others than to actually enjoy them for themselves, and the great shame is that innovations like BitTorrent have, unfortunately, given any spotty oik the means to do it.