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Blu-ray/HD DVD Disc Sales Numbers Revealed
An anonymous reader writes "The High-Def format wars finally have a yardstick against which to measure who's winning with the first public release of VideoScan sales figures for both HD DVD and Blu-ray. The first two weeks' worth of data seem to back up what many predicted — that the Blu-ray-enabled PS3 is helping Sony quickly close the gap with HD DVD, with almost three Blu-ray discs sold for every one HD DVD during the first week of January. HD DVD still leads in overall discs sold since inception, but that lead looks to be quickly dwindling. While they do show a trend, the results from VideoScan are still fairly vague. Why are consumers being denied the information they need to make a considered choice?"
That comment is insane for so many reasons. Not the least of which being that Blu-Ray could "beat" HD-DVD and still lose. If they 5 times as many Blu-Ray media as HD-DVD, but only sell 10,000 units per year, then they fail. From TFA:
you won't find any hard sales figures here
In other words, we have no idea how either format is doing on an absolute scale.
So, how many of these Blu-ray hardware sales actually *movies*? You know, the stuff that HD-DVD is a direct competitor for? If the format becomes something that's only economically viable to be used as game media for the PS3 then it becomes as relevant as SNES cartridges in the long run.
I like basketball!!1!
The one thought that keeps swirling through my mind when I browse through the HD movie section at my local Best Buy is, Who the HECK figures out the pricing for these things?!
How can Little Man cost $29 but the Fifth Element is only $19!?
I've owned the HD-DVD drive for the XBox360 now since it's launch and the only HD disc I currently own is the free copy of King Kong that came with it.
I'm floored that new titles aren't being released in both DVD and in their respective HD format at the same time. The studios seem too busy trying to 'catch up', releasing titles already available on DVD. I know they're doing this in hopes that people purchase both the DVD version and HD version when it's released later, in an effort to double their money.
Makes me want to vomit.
Just for a moment, forget the consumer (everyone else is doing it...)
Whatever your feelings re PS3, you know it's going to sell 10 million units plus in a short time. In the meantime, only relatively small numbers of consumers are actually buying either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray players. DVD is good enough for most. Although the PS3 isn't primarily a Blu-Ray player, it does have that feature.
So when you're a movie studio or retailer and looking at the current / expected install base of HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray capable players over the next year or so, Blu-Ray is the only way to go. The PS3 is putting high definition playback into homes ahead of the mainstream demand. I read last week (Ars Technica I think) that total sales of Blu-Ray plus HD-DVD standalone players were around 700,000 in the US so far. PS3 alone is probably past that by now.
Standalone players are likely to sell more discs per unit than PS3s, but I'd guess many people with $600 to spend on a console will also grab a few Blu-Ray discs to try out.
Vouchers were given inside Playstation 3 boxes for free Blu-Ray discs. Everyone who bought a PS3 simply for gaming went out and used these vouchers up.
The more interesting comparison would be the number of HDDVD's sold against the number of Blu-Ray discs sold - vouchers used.
YES! But that's not precisely why. Here's what the FS says:
Now, here is what the FA says:
In other words, this is a momentary blip on the chart, and nothing to be excited about itself, unless it continues, in which case you can call it a trend. Right now though, it's not a big deal.
I sincerely hope that these people are not paid astroturfers, but if they are, it would explain why Sony has to charge so much for the PS3. I've had more people misinterpret my posts and tell outright lies in order to discredit them in the last couple days than I ever have before, and most of those comments are responses to things I've said about the PS3 or Sony.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
LG's player isn't a true dual format player. It doesn't qualify for HD DVD logo-ing. I believe it doesn't handle any HDi, so it plays HD DVD advanced content titles (all Hollywood discs are adv. content, not standard content) in some manner it makes up. Take your chances.
What the hell are you talking about? For one, there is *NO* HD-DVR out there that encodes the material it's storing. None. Zero. Nada. There's simply too much video to make that realistic. Every one of these machines simply demodulates the QAM, pulls out the MPEG stream, and saves it to disk. That's it. No quality loss whatsoever.
Second, storage is a solved problem. Harddisks get bigger every single day. It's simply not an issue. Granted, existing DVRs are a little lean on storage, but that will change with time (my Myth box at home has 250GB, and there are many with 1TB+ setups).
Third, the very idea of Internet distribution of HD, which can be upwards of 7 *gigabytes per hour*, is simply laughable. There's no way in hell that would get popular enough to sway the HD-DVD/Blu-ray battle in any way whatsoever.
You completely misunderstood my post. The point is not that HD-DVD is "gonna win": the point is simply that Sony could beat HD-DVD and still fail to make a profitable product. As long as the media is pricey and not backwards compatible with pervasive existing equipment, it's going to be a tough sell. Let's remember that 5,000,000 PS3 units sold in the US (reasonable for year or so of sales) translates into about 4.5% market saturation (assuming about 110 million households in the US). That's pretty puny compared to 82% market saturation for DVD, a product that by and large, consumers are very happy with. Heck, with 15 million PSPs out in the wild, Sony couldn't make UMD stick.