Dave Horvath
25 Jan 2008 15:46
Ever since movie giant Warner Brothers defected and sided with the Blu-ray camp, its been an uphill battle for those involved with rival HD-DVD. Just weeks after the announcement of WB switching sides, NPD data shows that hardware sales for HD-DVD came to a virtual halt. The NPD Group recorded Blu-ray as having an astounding 93% sales advantage.
According to raw data provided by NPD, consumers bought just 1,758 HD DVD players the week of Jan. 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. The NPD however, would not confirm or deny the actual sales figures and labeled them as proprietary.
Analysts such as Steve Baker say that although this defection was definitely a hard blow to HD-DVD, he added the caveat that its still too soon to tell whether this is the start of a trend. Baker was quoted in saying, "It’s always very dangerous to make long-term assumptions based on one-week sales data."
Baker also noted that strong marketing pushes by Sony and Sharp to include Blu-ray players along with HDTVs haven't helped the cause. "And we haven’t seen the results of Toshiba significantly dropping the price of their set-top players" 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."