Blu-Ray is crushing HD DVD, as recent HD DVD sales grind to a virtual halt

Warner Home Video’s defection from the HD DVD camp may have put a damper on hardware sales In the week since the studio’s surprise early-January announcement that after May it will support only the rival Blu-ray Disc format, sales of HD DVD players ground to a virtual halt, giving Blu-ray hardware a whopping 93% sales advantage, according to data from the NPD Group.

According to raw retail data collected by NPD, consumers bought just 1,758 HD DVD players the week of January 12, down from 14,558 players the week before. In contrast, consumers bought 21,770 Blu-ray Disc machines, up from 15,257 the previous week.

NPD would not confirm or deny the actual sales figures, saying they are proprietary. (A copy of the report was provided to The Hollywood Reporter by a third-party source.)

But analyst Stephen Baker confirmed the weekly market-share shift, with the caveat that it’s too soon to tell whether this is the start of a long-term trend.

“It’s always very dangerous to make long-term assumptions based on one-week sales data,” he said.

Baker said that while the Warner defection might have had an impact on HD DVD player sales, other factors also may have come into play, including an aggressive promotion by Sony and Sharp in which HDTVs were bundled with Blu-ray Disc players.

“And we haven’t seen the results of Toshiba significantly dropping the price of their set-top players (later in the month),” Baker said. “One week just doesn’t give us enough data points to say something is going on for the long term. It only tells me in one week something happened.”

NPD tracks point-of-sale data from major U.S. retailers that collectively account for about two-thirds of consumer electronics hardware sales.

By Thomas K. Arnold (Computerworld)

With hi-def war, it’s 1975 all over again (Blu-Ray vs HD DVD)

Wrong. High-definition DVD technology has been retro, forcing consumers to choose one of two formats, Blu-ray or HD DVD, bringing back memories of VCRs and the VHS vs. Betamax wars.

That’s because movie studios and technology companies have lined up on two different sides of high-definition DVD technology.

“I’d like to spank both sides on the fanny because they left it up to the consumer, and they shouldn’t have,” said Dale Cripps, publisher and founder of HDTV magazine.

“Either way the consumer is facing some kind of loss, based on the choice they make: ‘If I choose Blu-ray, and it turns out that HD DVD sprints off to success, do I have movies and equipment that can play it?”

An HD-DVD video disc of “The Bourne Supremacy” is seen at left,

with a Blu-Ray disc of “Superman Returns” at right

Most movies are available in both formats. Still, you’re going to find yourself with an extra chore to do in the video aisle: doublechecking whether the movie you want is available in the format that will work with your high-definition DVD player.

And it helps to keep a scorecard of which movie studio is backing which format or both, something that seems to be changing every week.