Blu-ray discs take sales lead

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 28 February 2007 12:07

IT Industry - Market

More Blu-ray discs have been purchased than HD DVD, according to sales figures recently released, but it's not obvious why.

According to Nielsen VideoScan data cited by VideoStoreMag, 100 units of Blu-ray titles have been sold in the US for every 98.71 units of HD DVD.

Until mid-February, HD DVD was ahead. This may have been because the players in this format had been out longer or because they were cheaper.

On the hardware side, Blu-ray is outselling HD DVD by five to one, but this is largely due to Sony's PlayStation 3. Since Blu-ray discs aren't selling that strongly, it's tempting to suggest that PlayStation owners either aren't interested in using it to play Blu-ray discs, or the current list of titles doesn't appeal to them. An HD DVD drive is available for the Xbox 360.

A Universal Studios spokesperson was quoted as saying that five times as many disks have been sold for each HD DVD player purchased than there have for each Blu-ray player. However, this could be due to the recent surge in Blu-ray hardware sales - it takes time to build a collection of discs.

Even though the PS3 has yet to go on sale in Australia, JB HiFi - one of the country's leading disc retailers - has made a policy decision to stock Blu-ray as its sole high-def format.

Apple committed to Blu-ray back in 2005, but we have yet to see a product from the company. With new notebook and desktop models expected in coming months, we would not be surprised to see Blu-ray drives in at least some configurations.

For now, at least some studios seem happy to sell their movies on both formats, and Warner Bros has developed a multi-layer scheme that will allow them to put a movie in both formats onto a single disk.