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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.
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.
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.