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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?"
This hurts the consumer on way too many levels. You might as well release music in several formats...Oh, wait a minute...where's my 8 track player? Ooh! I just found my Betamax VCR. Screw this DVD shit, it won't last out the year's end.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
Help! Help! I'm being oppressed!
You know, the Blu-ray/HD DVD squabble is not actually important. You rights aren't being trampled on. Most people couldn't care less about it; they're happy with their DVDs and don't mind letting you *philes hash it out with your disposable income.
Get a grip.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Dual format players will win this war. As soon as this sells below $500, all other makers will follow. Right now it sells for $1200.
r -multi-player-unboxed/
"Well this is more like it. After waiting forever between the initial announcement and first retail availability of the first wave of HD disc devices, LG's BH100 really rocketed to the shelves, and has just participated in its first unboxing (that we've heard of) mere weeks after the announcement at CES. We're a little disconcerted by that big front-and-center dent on the box, but the unit itself looks just dandy, and gadgetaholic promises a full review in the coming days. But that's not what you're here for, you just wanted to see this little guy ripped from his Styrofoam cocoon and flap his little Red and Blue wings, so hit the read link for the whole event. Fly, BH100, fly."
http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/22/lgs-bh100-supe
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.
"According to VideoScan, during the first two weeks of January, Blu-ray discs outsold HD DVD by more than a 2:1 margin."
Why does the summary make Blu-Ray sound better by saying it outsold HD DVD by 3:1 in 1 week? Do I detect a bias?
- Sony has never won a format war, haven't they learned their lesson? Just look at Beta and MD.
- Sony has had great sucess with their formats, can you say CD?
- There is no reason for anybody to even upgrade past DVD. There is simply no big difference between any new formats and DVD
- I simply will not buy anything from Sony after the whole DRM fiasco
- HD will win out because there will be more HD players on the market because of the cheap HD DVD add on for the Xbox 360
- There will be more Blue Ray players on the market because every PS3 comes with a Blue Ray drive
- Nobody will buy the HD DVD drive addon for the Xbox 360 because it is too expensive
- Nobody will buy the PS3 because it is too expensive
- Blue Ray disks hold more information than HD DVD disks and so Blue Ray will win
- HD DVD disks hold more information than Blue Ray disks so HD DVD will win
- What are you guys talking about? Its all about Nintendo
- Neither format will win because people will be downloading movies from here on our
- The name HD DVD just sounds better than Blue Ray
- The name Blue Ray just sounds better than HD DVD
- Movies these days are worthless I havent watched a movie in 25 years
Hopes this helps shed some light on which format is better.The usual reply to your comment on Slashdot would ne "You forgot about audio CD?" or "What about 3.5" floppies?" but I'll add another format to the list: 8mm tapes. They were quite dominant before the spread of MiniDV.
You must not be familiar with Verizon.
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.
FWIW, Bluray is superior to HD-DVD in many ways. So it has had (and still has) a good chance of "winning" against the competing HD-DVD format. The real problem with such a "win" is that it's not much of a "win" if you claim victory in the battle, but lose the war. Allow me to explain.
Despite all the hype surrounding HD-this and High Resolution-that, there hasn't been a major push by consumers to move to the new High Definition televisions. As it would seem, the vast majority of consumers are happy enough with their TVs as they are today. The real consumer push has been a much different one than quality.
Consumers today are looking for convenience first and quality second. They want to be able to sit in their living room and chose what they want to watch (or play!), when they want to watch it. Nothing makes this more apparent than the popularity of the TIVO and other DVR players.
These players timeshift shows from their regular schedules to a time that is more convenient for the viewer. Thanks to thier ties with online TV schedules, a user can setup his DVR to record dozens of shows. When he feels in the mood to watch something, he can then chose from the options at his disposal.
However, this process does have its drawbacks. The first one is that DVRs cause a drop in show quality. In order to balance real-time recording with space constraints, these devices must throw away a lot of information about the television stream. As a result, the quality drops.
The second drawback is that these devices have limited capacity. Once they are full, you must remove some material in order to make room for more material. This biases the devices against consumers who watch television on few, rare occasions, but enjoy a wide variety of entertainment.
The solution on the horizon is not digital transmissions over the airwaves, by digital cable, or even by plastic frisbees. The solution is to stream the video directly to the consumer over a broadband internet line. This allows the consumer to access a wide variety of quality material, but without the same storage drawbacks that limit DVR devices.
So what you'll see in the future is that the Bluray vs. HD-DVD war won't matter. The real winner will be Internet ala carte providers, who give the consumers what they want, when they want it. Sony shouldn't fear HD-DVD. They should fear Apple iTunes.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
All the people that bought a PS3 for christmas ran out to buy a blu ray to play on it. It's a temporary bump in sales.
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
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Not always. If the channel is coming in to the box digitally, it does not usually get transcoded. It's much easier for the box to record the bits directly. Video quality and ease of use are vastly superior to VHS.
I've been thinking about this. Why are consumer electronics companies so eager to stick DRM on products (typically they dislike it, it ads to cost and slows consumer adoption).
Because the content companies (Motion Picture folks) have to buy in. If there was just one format the consumer electronic companies could say, high def disk, take it or leave it. However since there are two formats the Studios can choose the format the offers the most protection. In a way because of the format war the studios got to say "Add DRM" or we'll go with the competeing HD format here.
It doesn't help that sony owns electronics and content, and the content part is clearly running the company.
You raise a very insightful point about quality and convenience. Think of the tape to CD and VHS to DVD leaps. Both new technologies had quality improvements over their predecessors but I'd argue neither would have taken off as quickly as they did (or at all) without the massive improvements in convenience. No more having to fast forward or rewind a tape or VHS movie to get to your favorite track or part of the movie, with the new format you could get where you wanted to go in a second. That was a huge factor when I moved to from tapes to CD's and it also came into play with DVD's. Rewinding a movie before you watched it or before returning it to the video store was a massive pain in the butt. You no longer had to worry about a bad player shredding the DVD or CD which was also a huge plus with both moves. Quality was more of a factor to convince me to move from VHS to DVD but you better believe that if that quality improvement didn't also include the improvements in convenience (e.g. it was still tape based or a single movie had to be split onto multiple discs) then I don't think the format would have caught on.
Wow: "Movies these days are worthless I havent watched a movie in 25 years" ... That's hard unless this guy doesn't watch any movies on DVDs, in theater, TV, etc. In fact, does he even watch TV shows? ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
"Not always. If the channel is coming in to the box digitally, it does not usually get transcoded."
I'd like to amend that a bit - in consumer DVRs, high-def content NEVER gets transcoded. It is always simply dumped to disc without decoding and/or reencoding. The transport stream is only decoded for playback.
Realtime high definition encoders simply do not exist, at least not at the price points needed to be put into a consumer device. The closest thing is the Slingbox PRO, but that downscales to SD before compression.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I see stupid people... all the time... they walk around like everyone else... they don't even know they're stupid.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
As to the question "Why are consumers being denied the information they need to make a considered choice?," I answer: I have all the information I need. With the DRM constraints, I don't intend to buy discs of either format.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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.
I'll be patient, and TiVo it when it's on cable.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
No. I'm talking about convenience > quality. Quality is not a driving factor at the moment, save for the early adopters. Consumers would much rather have convenience with acceptable quality rather than high quality with no noticeable increase in convenience. (If anything, the high def stuff is a mild decrease.)
Thus a minor quality upgrade (e.g. iTunes is 480p) coupled with a major increase in convenience is going to win the day; not the High Def frisbees. In addition, consumers will soon be able to have their cake and eat it too. Microsoft is already showing that Hi Def downloads that take advantage of more modern compression methods are possible on the higher end of the consumer bandwidth scale. The quality isn't quite as good as a $30 frisbee, but that's not going to swap most consumers. They can get the movie or TV show they want, when they want it, and for the price they want it.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
Besides, I don't think you give consumers enough credit.
I work in customer service and tech support. I am aware of exactly how much credit I need to give them. Which is slightly more then my dog.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
The problem with that argument is that the PS3 is not a Blu-Ray movie player, first and foremost : it is a gaming system.
The fact of the matter is that, yes, there are more Blu-Ray capable machines at the moment. But what is of question is how many of those machines is being used largely for watching films. By contrast, every single XBOX 360 add-on is exclusively for watching films, as MS has explicitly stated that no games will come out this generation that utilize the add-on. When you keep that in mind, the supposed install base numbers look much closer. Beyond that, it must be recognized how tiny the numbers we are talking about anyway - neither of them are signifigant at all at this point in terms of mass consumers.
The truth is, the format war is far from over. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are both going to remain niche formats for quite some time. Just because Sony shoe-horned a Blu-Ray player into the PS3 that most of their target audience would have bought anyway, does not a format war win. Especially since PS3's are rotting on the shelves (my local BB has signs up all over saying, "WE HAVE THEM!" and the signs are actually getting dusty they've been up for so long...), their impact over the life of the formats just may not be that signifigant.
Remember the race between the turtle and the hare?
AE
On the other hand, the people who end up calling tech support are quite often not the most adept when it comes to technology. So your sample is hardly representatory.