Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Just one week ago the North American HD DVD Promotional Group issued a media release broadcasting that "HD DVD is significantly ahead in the dedicated consumer electronics player market with 60% of all high definition set-top players sold." However, the announcement that the Blockbuster video store chain will stock only Blu-ray titles in its remaining 1200 stores after an initial 500-store trial exposes HD DVD spin for what it is.
In the world of consumer electronics it's easy to
play around with statistics and make them dance to your tune -
especially if you're using terms like "dedicated consumer electronics
player" when taking about high definition video. As we all know, by far
the biggest selling high definition player to date is the Blu-ray
toting PlayStation 3 - a non-dedicated player.
The PS3 may so far be a poor selling games console compared to its
competitors but in the fledgling high definition video player space it
simply blows its competitors away. Even if most consumers aren't buying the PS3 to play
videos, it's hard to imagine that they wouldn't also use it for that
purpose.
To give some indication of the difference between HD DVD player sales
and PS3 sales, using the HD DVD Promotional Group's own numbers,
consumers have purchased 150,000 dedicated HD DVD consumer electronics players. To
date, worldwide sales of PS3 consoles is approaching 4 million, with
about 1.5 million sold in the US. Add to that about 100,000 dedicated Blu-ray players sold.
So the HD DVD camp can crow about its 4 to 1 movie attach rate
advantage over Blu-ray players but it doesn't really hold water when
you have 25 times the number of Blu-ray players in homes.
As far as price is concerned, what was once the biggest selling point
of HD DVD players is fast diminishing. In the US, the gap is now just
$100 between the cheapest players of both formats and that is likely to
disappear altogether in the not too distant future. Things can always
turn around of course, but when the biggest video store on the block
throws its lot in with Blu-ray then its seems that the writing is on
the wall for HD DVD - can anyone spell Betamax?
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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