Euro Blu-ray movie sales reach 2.37m discs
Not good news for the HD DVD camp
Blu-ray Disc pre-recorded media sales have sailed past the two-and-a-quarter million mark in Europe, the format's promotional body said this week.
And, according to market watcher GfK, 79 per cent of hi-def discs bought by European consumers thus far this year have been BDs. The remaining 21 per cent were HD DVDs.
The Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) was most keen to highlight hitting the 2m mark, which was passed two months after the 1m point was reached, it claimed.
In fact, more than 2.37m BDs have been sold in Europe, according to figures from market research company Screen Digest by way of the BDA, which also claimed 3.2m PlayStation 3 consoles and 34,000 standalone BD players have purchased in Europe to date.
Now, the HD DVD Promotional Group this week said its favoured format accounted for more than 60 per cent of standalone player sales up to the end of 2007. Doing a rough, back-of-an-envelope calculation, that means those 34,000 BD players are approximately 40 per cent of the total number of hi-def players sold in Europe, which we calculate therefore to be 85,000 units.
So Europeans own roughly 51,000 HD DVD players.
Yes, the number of BD players is a total reached a month-and-a-half after the averred HD DVD market share was taken, but unless sales of HD DVD players have spiked of late - needless to say, they haven't, or the HD DVD PG would have said so - the sales ratio will be much the same now as then. If anything, we'd expect it to shift in BD's favour, after the Warner announcement that it will support the format exclusively.
Earlier this month, Screen Digest was reported as saying there are 55,000 HD DVD players and Xbox add-on drives in European homes, so we're in the ballpark.
Whatever the exact figure, the point is the number of Blu-ray capable players out there is substantially way beyond the number of HD DVD capable devices. According to GfK, Q4 2007 BD player sales exceeded those of HD DVD machines.
The HD DVD PG said that Q4 had seen a doubling of HD DVD sales, so we're looking at a total of around 25,500 units up to that point. If BD sales were higher than that, even by a small margin, it means that the vast majority of those aforementioned 34,000 BD players were purchased in Q4 - or only 8,500 had been sold up to the end of Q3 2007.
That's a quarter-on-quarter growth rate of roughly 300 per cent cent for BD, compared to 100 per cent for HD DVD. So even ignoring the PS3, there's clearly rising demand for Blu-ray. If these rates are maintained, there'll be more BD players in European homes than HD DVD ones by the end of the current quarter.
Can HD DVD keep up? If it maintains its player price advantage, quite possibly. But if sales of BD players are increasing so much even when they cost twice as much, on average, as HD DVD machines, how would they grow if Sony, Sharp, Samsung and cut their prices as much as Toshiba has?
COMMENTS
Yes it is over
For the people claiming that a majority of the Blue Ray players are PS3 and therefore should not be counted: GET A CLUE!
A lot of people have bought a PS3 because of the Blue Ray and they use it to watch BD movies so I don't see any reason why it should not be counted.
Plus, you might want to read Slashdot and around the web on Wal-Mart, the biggest US retailer of anything, saying that they are dropping HD-DVD and Toshiba about to announce the end of it. Not only, more and more sources are claiming that Toshiba already has one or two Blue Ray players ready for release because they cannot afford to fall behind the market.
Good bye HD-DVD was nice meeting you (not really, I never cared for 20GB less capacity than BD).
re: Why say it in Europe??
Why? Because it's important what studios in Hollywood do. You claim that the distribution in other countries is not related to them and I tell you that you're wrong. All major studios also own distribution companies even if they have a different name, for example Disney distributes in Europe under Buena Vista Entertainment and Buena Vista Home Entertainment; FOX distributes its own movies... etc. so it's wrong to say that their choice has no impact in Europe.
@Ian, Re:Fanboy idiocy reigns supreme
To be fair, i've seen plenty of HD DVD fanboyism too.
I think people wanted the war to end soon so they could buy without feeling as though they backed 'the loser'.
I happen to benefit from a BD player with my PS3, but i bought the unit primarily to play games, so if HD-DVD had won the format war i would have bought an HD-DVD player. That said, I do now use the PS3 often to play (rented) BD's and play SD upscaled.
At the end of the day, it's about the big corps skinning us for more money to buy the same stuff again. VHS-DVD anyone? Yeh, i did it too. Now they want the cash again for DVD-HDFORMATOFCHOICE
I for one do not want to go down the route of 'online' everything. It's not much more than a permanent rental agreement.
If you want a credible link, how about Reuters..
If you want a credible link, how about Reuters.. This is exciting, watching the slow and painful death of a format. The Internet death frenzy was not around when Betamax and Laserdisc failed...
http://ca.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idCAN1451010520080215
The high-definition DVD format war has turned into a format death watch.
Toshiba is expected to pull the plug on its HD DVD format in the coming weeks, after a rash of retail defections that followed Warner Home Video's stunning announcement in early January that it would support only Sony's rival Blu-ray Disc format after May.
Lets get Physical
whislt "downloads" are the future....... like tinfoil clothes, flying cars and moonbases?
people still still like to buy stuff, whilst the demand and peoples familarity with buying products purely in electronic format becasue off *tunes etc will eventually reach a tipping point.
but, people still like to get there hands on purchases over a certain value, an i have even bought e-tickets for flights knowing how organisatioans are prone to "computer trouble" you do wonder if the people on the desk at teh airport will find your bookign refernce?
as for discs verses e-files, unless they are stripped of DRM or we have a drm that enables the equivelent of taking the dvd and the six-pack around to your mates then there are still some issues to be addressed? be it via a removable drive, or enablign streaming from your home server to another location in pnp style we still ahve some way to go. Let alone the issues of backup and restore, as its one think loosing your phone or mp3 player, imagine loosing your terrabytes of media due to a failure or tornado/flood?
so do we all migrate to massive 3rd party hosted online vaults which you or your mates can log onto? do we have a big media server chugging away in the corner?
i know the media types would proabbaly prefer us to have none of this and down load everyting on a pay per view basis?
which is fine as long as we ahve access to a variety of products and not just the top20 hollywood blockbuster (also know of t*ss or chav fodder)
I know there are products
