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HD DVD Player Sales Grind To a Halt

Posted by kdawson on from the it-was-that-bunker-video-did-it dept.

Lucas123 writes "While the news may fall under the 'Duh' category, it's still relatively shocking how quickly the death knell for HD DVD player sales came on after Warner Bros. announced they were dropping dual hi-def DVD format support in order to back only Blu-ray. According to a Computerworld story, the week after Warner's announcement, sales of HD DVD players dropped to 1,758, down from 14,558 players the week before. In contrast, consumers bought 21,770 Blu-ray Disc players, up from 15,257 the previous week."

5 of 507 comments (clear)

  1. Take with a grain of salt or two... by Wdomburg · · Score: 5, Informative

    The folks at NPD have already said not to make too much of these numbers. Not only do they reflect a single week of data immediately following the Warner announcement and prior to Toshiba cutting prices in half, there were also free Blu-ray player promotions from Panasonic, Sharp and Sony. Easy to "sell" a lot of units when the price tag is $0.

  2. Re:"blue ray player" totals by AvitarX · · Score: 4, Informative

    PS3 has been more than doubling that number

    So no, it does not include the PS3.

    What I find most interesting though is the loss of about 7k sales overall. That would be the cost of a more expensive format.

    I personally am happy blue ray wins (I want 50GB burnable disks, not 30GB). But I would have been pretty satisfied to see Sony lose to just because I like to see big companies fail when pushing things to hard (I guess Toshiba pushed pretty hard too, but they keep to quite for it to be as enjoyable).

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  3. Think of where you would go - the sales are there by SuperKendall · · Score: 3, Informative

    PS3 sales also spiked pretty well. Remember, if you are suddenly looking for a Blu-Ray player. the PS3 is a very appealing choice - even if all you use it for is Blu-Ray, with the remote it's good as any other dedicated player (and better really since it's future proof and so easy to connect to a network connection wirelessly).

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    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
  4. Downloads vs. Discs by Aardvark99 · · Score: 3, Informative

    I found this quality comparison of different HD sources (Cable, FIOS, Blue Ray, etc...) to be interesting:
    http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=962

  5. Re:"blue ray player" totals by Troed · · Score: 5, Informative

    Correct me if I'm wrong

    OK.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc

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