HD DVD player sales share slumps
Warner move has stronger pull than Toshiba price cuts?
This month hasn't just seen a relative decline in US HD DVD software sales - purchases of players appear to be down to, the latest figures from market watcher NPD suggest.
The numbers, relayed by website The Digital Bits, cover weekly sales of dedicated players - so the PS3 and the Xbox 360 add-on are not included - from the end of December 2007 through to the end of the second week of January.
For the week ending 29 December 2007, the two formats player marketshare stood at 39.81 per cent HD DVD and 60.19 per cent Blu-ray. The following week, ended 5 January 2008, HD DVD's share rose to 48.83 per cent, undoubtedly a result of Toshiba's player price cuts. Blu-ray accounted for 51.17 per cent of the market.
On the penultimate day of that week, Friday, 4 January, Warner Home Video went public on its plan to stop supporting HD DVD. The result: HD DVD's share of player sales in the following week plunged to less than ten per cent of the total - 7.47 per cent, to be precise.
US Standalone HD Player Sales
Source: NPD
Aggregating the January weekly numbers, The Digital Bits puts Blu-ray's share of player sales at around 70 per cent, and HD DVD's on 30 percent, a clear drop on the roughly 60:40 ratio at the end of December.
What these figures don't show is what the shift seen in the second week of January means for overall unit shipments of each format. But it does show that whether sales are rising or dipping in the post-Christmas lull, punters are buying more Blu-ray machines than HD DVD players. And that's before we bring the PS3 into the equation.
That said, two weeks' sales don't necessarily define a trend, and we look forward to further NPD numbers to see whether early January's numbers are a short-term slip or the shape of things to come.
COMMENTS
This disc format war is irrelevant...
BluRay vs HD-DVD - Who cares - both formats will be obsolete within 5 years.
1. Solid state storage is such that within that time plastic semiconductors with make all "laser" discs obsolete.
2. End users will increasingly want real digital libraries not libraries full of old fashioned plastic disks that can get scratched and lost. Neither - but especially BluRay, support ripping of disc content to digital libraries.
BluRay & HD-DVD - die already you belong with BetaMAX and vinyl. I hope Sony & MS loose their shirts in this self grandiose consumer scam.
hd dvd vs blu
its all a big con.
ive come to realise it does no matter what hd dvd does it will get screwed
from studios supporting blu because when b+ encoding comes in you will not even be aloud to borrow sell or copy a product that you have brought,
once the disc is played in your player it is not transferable,
also with the added price of blu ray retailers will have a bigger cut of the profit
so by selling hd dvd players they will lose there profit because of the lower retail value,
so all in all the consumer chose(my arse)
Why no Xbox360 HD-DVD in the total?
It may not make much difference but why are Xbox360 HD-DVD sales not included? If someone buys a PS3 it is unclear if they are buying it as primarily a BluRay player or games machine. But anyone who buys an Xbox360 HD-DVD drive is buying it for one reason only... to watch HD-DVDs!!
@Chris
"HD-DVD do not have any uncompressed audio tracks available"
Where did you get that idea? There are absolutely loads of HD-DVD titles with lossless Dolby TrueHD on; even Phantom Of The Opera, one of the discs released on day one of the format, had it.
PCM is IDENTICAL to Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD Master Audio once it reaches the amp - that's what lossless means. Or do you argue the superiority of WAV over FLAC, too?
my local electrical stores...
Was out shopping the other day and popped into my local currys. Whilst browsing i noticed they had two different blu-ray players on their shelves, but not a single hd-dvd player was on display, not even an empty space where one may have previously sat. So i thought i would check out the other stores in the area, and low and behold, it looks like they have all decided blu-ray will win, as none of them now appear to stock hd-dvd players.
On a further note of blu-ray supremacy, HD-DVD do not have any uncompressed audio tracks available, they do claim to hold lossless compressed audio tracks on some, but few of the big studios ever used these formats. However, now pretty much all blu-ray discs hold PCM tracks, which are basically uncompressed audio tracks. If you have ever heard one whilst watching a movie, it is stunning. OK most home cinema kits won't be able to play them, but trust me, High Def is not only about the picture, but also the sound and PCM is where the sound is at. Try it and nothing else will ever do again, PCM makes you a part of the film. PCM remember is ONLY available on blu-ray.
