At an announcement that Cox Communications would broadcast more than 100 Padres games this season in high definition, Dick Komiyama, the president and COO of Sony Electronics, stole the show by announcing his company’s headquarters were moving to San Diego from Park Ridge, N.J.

Sony is not new to San Diego. It has had a major presence in Rancho Bernardo since it started building television sets here in 1972. Indeed, in April 1998 San Diego Metropolitan’s cover story — www.sandiegometro.com/1998/apr/ — featured Yutaka Sato, the man who brought the Walkman to the United States and was running Sony’s Wireless Telecommunications Co. here. (He was pictured holding a prototype phone that would hold a camera.)

It is unclear how many jobs actually will be moved, although it is expected to exceed 100 and perhaps be in the hundreds. The uncertainty is because Sony is in the midst of a companywide workforce reduction. Yet the number of net jobs involved almost is incidental. Sony Electronics posted $11 billion in sales last year. Qualcomm, by comparison, posted revenue of $3.8 billion in 2003.

Sony was at the press conference because it is installing more than 800 televisions at Petco Park, about a third of them high-definition models.

Cox is spending more than $1 million on outfitting a new truck for the technology and buying new cameras. Since Cox also broadcasts on its cable Channel 4 basketball games for SDSU and USD, it expects more than 150 high-def telecasts this year.

The team says this will be the most aggressive broadcast of HDTV games in the major leagues. Along with all home games, the newly outfitted HDTV truck will travel with the Padres to most games played in the Western division — San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix. It will not make the trip this season to Denver.

The Padres and the cable station share a unique partnership. Cox created its Channel 4 station in 1997 largely on the strength of its contract with the Padres to broadcast most home and away games.

Right now, Cox estimates there are about 25,000 households with HDTV sets in San Diego County. A small amount, to be sure. But the technology is gaining rapid and wide acceptance. Having the games gives Cox customers another reason to stick with the company and not, for example, move to Direct TV where the broadcasts are not available.

Dan Novak, Cox v.p. of programming and communications, says viewers, whetted by the quality delivered through the explosive growth of DVDs, are hungry for more. “What (the DVD) did was change people’s expectations of what video should look and sound like,” Novak says. For looks, HDTV is the next level.

At the ballpark, Novak is excited about possibilities that include using one of the seven game cameras to show, in a single shot, both a pitcher on the mound and a runner on first base threatening to steal.

In order to get the broadcasts, a Cox customer must have an HDTV-ready television set and the appropriate Cox-issued decoder box. Those set-top boxes cost an additional $4 a month. They also work to receive the HDTV broadcasts now being offered by the networks and some other cable channels.

The first HDTV broadcast is an exhibition game at 7 p.m. April 3 against the Seattle Mariners from Petco Park.

Cox San Diego, which got the corporate green light to spend the HDTV dough in September, expects to lead the nation this year in carrying local HDTV broadcasts. And it seems fitting. In 1990, techno-wizards at the former General Instruments in San Diego figured out how to digitize the high-definition signal. Eight years later, Sony’s first U.S. version rolled off an assembly line here, a 34-inch tube model that retailed for $8,999 at the late Dow Stereo.