Mark Cuban thinks it’s very important. Of course, he has invested heavily in high definition video content and distribution.
There’s a huge audience of people who like sports, and movies about things that explode dramatically. Presumably those are the people for whom “quality” means more pixels.
For me, long tail access and convenience are many times more important than better pictures. I could get by with crappy little pictures for a long time, if I could find the niche content that I care about.
I wonder about the size of the respective markets for mass market content with really pretty pictures, and niche content with ordinary pictures. Probably both very big. Probably the important business insight is to forget that there were once one-size-fits-all tv and movie markets.