what are worldwide figures? What are figures by country? Just because the US doesn't adopt something doesn't mean it's not getting adopted. The US has access to web streaming in HD of many shows and movies that the rest of the world does not - could that have anything to do with it?
In Asia (with the exception of Japan and South Korea), Blu-ray is way behind DVD's for the simple reason that there are no pirated blu-ray discs for sale out on every street corner. Pirated DVD's are quite ubiquitous and have been improving substantially in quality, due mainly to the various leaked screeners prior to a film's release.
DVD9's that contain HD content are starting to gain traction, however.
In the case of online media, there is also hardly any access to good streaming HD content in Asia due to region-specific policies.
While we are on the topic, anyone seen a good solution to scan, OCR, and reconvert existing crappy pdfs to improve them?
I've tried quite a few free and proprietary OCR's and the best available right now, imho, is ABBYY Finereader. Other than fonts, it also easily recognizes tables, diagrams and illustrations. But most of all, it can read and render 189 languages (including Chinese and Cyrillic) accurately. A free trial version is available.
With your bare hands?!?