Blu-ray Disc: One million served
By Erik Hanson 
posted Apr 23rd 2007 2:52PM
posted Apr 23rd 2007 2:52PM
The Blu-ray vs HD DVD format war reaches another milestone, with sales of Blu-ray Discs reaching more than one million sold since the format launched less than a year ago. According to Home Media Research, Blu-ray locked up 70% of high-definition movies sales in the first quarter of 2007 (832,530 to 359,300), and account for seven of the top ten best-selling high-def movies. Even on those few titles available in both formats, like The Departed, consumers are buying more Blu-ray than HD DVD versions. HD DVD owners and fans can still point to sales of their format of choice reaching number one at Amazon recently -- as well as early release dates like The Matrix and exclusives like Smokin' Aces -- but with Blu-ray-only Disney releasing big titles like Cars and both Pirates movies in the coming months, the Blu-ray Disc Association won't be stopping the press releases anytime soon.Read - Reuters
Read - Business Wire
Launched later but hit first million ahead of hd-dud :)
Awesome!
US only? Can we pleaaase get accumulated worldwide figures? It would be much more helpful.
hmmm so that means everyone that bought a PS3 has now purchased.....one movie.
Congrats Blu Ray for the overwhelming success! ;)
Odd how they forget to mention that the pre-orders for Planet Earth HDDVD outstrip those for the BD version.
The 1st quarter numbers were impacted by the HDDVD stand-down until the players could be updated to replace the leaked copy protection keys. Hardly any HDDVDs were issued in Q1, so it's a really bad comparison.
Q2 and Q3 will tell the tale, but one wonders why Sony needs to keep claiming victory. It's not over 'til it's over.
Have you hd-dud fanboys seen the lates Reuters article about the format war? Hmmm?
Blu-ray burning its high-def DVD rival
http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSN2220834920070423
Take note on the word BURNING ;) lmao
You can spin this any way you want Dave, et al. Watch this:
BD has what, 2 MILLION players out there? (sorry, if Sony can count all PS3s as BD players, so can I). That means that each BD player has about 0.5 disks attached to it.
HD DVD has sold 100,000 standalone players and almost 100,000 HD DVD add-ons for the 360, yet they managed to sell 359,000+ disks THIS YEAR ALONE and nearly a million over the lifetime. That's an attach rate of ~5/player.
Yeah, HD DVD is really dead *roll eyes*
I thought PS3 was meant to play games, but you know better :D
And no, they do not count the free BDs. Toshiba gives how many ... 5 free hd dvds per player. Here is where the true 900 000 hd dvd come from. LOL
You HDdvd fanatics realize they are talking about movies only right?? In N/A, the only place where HDdvd sales are greater than 20,000 disks if they are lucky. You know like JAP, AUS, UK, ect... This dosen't include PS3 games. HDdvd has no chance at this point to catch up in software sales. Which means that BRD movies will be wal-mart cheap before HDdvd's. Why so glum? sony's new Blu-ray player will be $299 at wal-mart this christmas. There is something to look forward to!
the writings on the wall man... the blue ray ftw dude. like why cant you see it. man. anyway.............................................
i got to roll with walk2k, if that is your real name, but you just aint gonna win no format 'war' with out them purrty pictures that pixar & disney bring to the table. and thats only like 2 studios, man like what about fricking sony studios. can you say spiderman 3 on the ray. i really dont care for fanbot title but its what it is. so like
peace
buncha Blu Ray man cheerleaders again....obviously too smitten wanking themselves with their Talledega Nights disc to remember that DVD took off just fine without any company called Pixar and many years before Star Wars came to disc. Grow up!
alex
i used them as examples, but my point was that it all comes down to studio support. and the rays got it. c'mon pretty much
gamers, any gamers in the crowd, you over there, no. ok i will continue, lets look at the 360 and lets look at the ps3. both kick ass and to be honest ps3 is better if you look at it from a hardware right out the box look. but thats not what i am getting at. games it comes down to the GAMES the 360 is kicking all types of ass and taking names. right now 360 has more exclusives and if you look at port between the ps3 and the 360 tehy look about the same. so until sony picks up and delivers exclusive blockbusters, gow3, ff#, heavenly sword as examples. its going to loose to the box. now back to the ray and the hd dvd, hd dvd gots all types of small studios in europe and one major one in the states. wow. sony pretty much has all the major players in their corner. unless hd dvd kicks it up a notch and releases exclusive, hi def movies that you cant watch on any other next gen player it is dead in the water. i will shut up now.
peace
No offense BD guys but you really have no room to talk. The PS3, albiet a powerful syste, is failing. No amount of Sony PR spin is going to change the public's mind on this. The only reason why the PS3 is helping the sales of BD is because it has very little in the way of games, and even fewer exclusive games. How will these numbers look in a year when the PS3 is really ramping up production on its game development? Do you honestly think a gamer is going to choose to buy 1 or 2 BD titles when they could use that money on a new hot selling game? If you do then you are smoking something. The PS3 is a game console first, and a BD player second.
Also to the guy who said there will be a $299 BD player by Christmas? Are you going to provide any proof or do you just want to continue to talk out of your ass? I don't want any article with some hypothetical speculation either. Show me an article where a Sony, Phillips, or Panasonic exec states very clearly they will have a $299 BD player by years end. If not then stop bullshitting everybody here. The only article I have seen is from Sony who said they will have a $599 standalone BD player out by July, a full $200 more than the cheapest standalone HD DvD player which could very well drop in between now and then.
Is the war over? No. Why don't you guys realize this? Universal, Intel, Microsoft, and Toshiba ALL have a vested interest in keeping HD DvD afloat and with such a rigorous fanbase such as we saw last week it is quite apparent that its a profitable sector. There is about as much of a chance of Universal releasing BD titles as there is Sony releasing HD DvD titles. So until you see BD discs outsell HD DvD 30:1, and standalone BD players outsell standalone HD DvD players 10:1 I doubt you will see anybody sway on the matter.
As for me, do I support one format over the other? Not particularly. I currently own a 360 HD DvD drive as well as a PS3. My movie bookshelf is swathed in red and blue titles, albiet a bit more red titles (what can I say HD DvD titles usually get rated higher for their audio and visual). I do however, love to shove it in the faces of blind loyalist fanboys who feel obligated to stand up for a company that has given them nothing. You pay for their product and you get what you paid for. Thats it. BD fanboys seem the most ardent about their product more than likely because most of them are gamers who undoubtedly have a soft spot for the Playstation brand and therefor follow everything that Sony does with a cult-like zeal. I love sticking it to em.
P.S. Standalone HD DvD players still continually outsell standalone BD players.
P.P.S. Any information I directly implied or stated in my argument is subject to change, its a dog-eat-dog world.
HAHAHAHH..I can't stop laughing at these Blu-Ray cry babies. It seems that a few people here failed to hear the news that by the end of 2007 and in 2008 there will be between 2-6 million HD-DVD players available for most likely $199. From Walmart to many Chinese manufacturers like Apex, Lite-On and a few others that supply stores like Target, KMart and other huge retail chains in the States. Only Walmart announced an overall investment into HD-DVD players of over 300 million dollars.
If anyone should be selling their equipment, that's you walk2k. You fail to see that most exlusive Blu-Ray backers are going neutral.
TDK, Samsung, LG, all movie studios pretty much except Fox, MGM and Disney are sticking to Blu-Ray but as we can see Fox delayed ALL of their Blu-Ray releases until further notice conveniently just before the Walmart and 2 million HD-DVD players announcment. It's just a matter of time when Fox goes neutral. Disney will be turning around soon and MGM will probably never turn around because it's owned by Sony.
It's all about money and EVERYONE got it.
With 2-6 million HD-DVD players scheduled by the end of 2007 and into 2008 through major retail chains in States, I guarantee that more and more BD exclusive backers will start switching over to HD-DVD. It already started with LG, HP, Samsung, now TDK (as they are manufacturing HD-DVD stuff for Walmart), all major movies studios went neutral except Fox, MGM (MGM being owned by Sony) and Disney and even Fox pulled all of their BD releases (the announcement came just before Walmart HD-DVD deal). Fox said it was because of DRM glitch with BD, but we all know what's happening. Feel free to expect Fox going neutral pretty soon.
These businesses are in this for the money and after all Sony promises failed (that they used to get such huge support to begin with), companies are saying "well let's give HD-DVD a try, they have more reliable consumer base, huge amounts of players are coming and cheaper players mean more sold movies, devices, not to mention bigger profit margins as there's no need for changes in the manufacturing).
Let's not even talk Europe as it is pretty much all HD-DVD oriented.
Blu-Ray has noone else to blame but themselves. The standard doesn't even have firm specifications for Christ sake. It's half-assed technology that they said, oh we'll just hit them with huge marketing, false promises and will iron out the glitches along the way, PS3 will buy us time. But hey, I guess you can scream bigger storage and bigger bandwith even though both things don't do anything for the consumer. After the CEO of Sony said that PS3 might fail, I can guarantee you that BD backers are not so happy. They've been waiting and waiting and don't see the "promised land".
This is why you will see HD-DVD exlusives as Matrix Trilogy, LoTR trilogy etc etc even though studios who release them are so called neutral.
Many are right, this war might be over by the end of 2007, and the winner is evident. HD-DVD.
For all you hd duds out there that think that they can do math, PS3's have only been out for 4 months, yet if you watched the charts from last year, you watched BR steadily catch up to HD DVD "before" the PS3 was released and then it pushed it over the top. Given the current US numbers, it would only take about 14% of PS3 owners to use it to watch movies, to surpass Toshiba and xbox, and that percentage is only going to down... You guys can only hope that Toshiba floods the market with cheap players to possibly turn the tide.
that's how you win the war you dumbass. How much of a fanboy and blind do you have to be to support a format that's twice more expensive, let's be objective, has same quality (there's absolutely nothing better with blu-ray in terms of quality) and will take more money out of your pocket due to so many royalties and closed protection schemes including regional protection. How lame do you have to be to go against a format that gives you actually backward compatibility (one movie in both regular DVD format and HD format so you don't have to buy 2 version of the movie), higher interactivity with features, networking and player support and on TOP of everything it's GOING TO BE $199 for a standalone player.
I mean really. Get your ass out of your head and think about things before you continue supporting a company that did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING for consumer in terms of what they wanted and DID EVERYTHING to rip everyone off, break our privacy by creating spyware and forcefully taking control over our computers on account of protection, WHO'S PROTECTION?
Really, you people need to get real. Who gives a crap what's going to happen in 10 years, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD will be replaced by something else anyways or even HD stream services.
Hey Nfinity, I didn't reduce myself to using profane language. Your writing shows that you've got a lot of angst, lighten up! There are plenty of people like myself that have the money to drop on BR without blinking. I have my own reasons for choosing that format because of what I do, and it goes beyond watching flix. I also have no desire for something like Walmart's brand-x Chinese derivative. Toshiba and Microsoft are certainly no angels here anymore than Sony. Everybody wants a piece of this royalty pie. The only thing that I miss out on are titles from Universal, and I can download what I want to see, so it's no big deal.
Well, the Matrix trilogy is Neutral already, they released an Offical press saying it would release on BD later in the year.
And if you think Sony is going to release Spiderman 1 2 and 3(which is already Advertised in BD inserts for Oct 07) on HD DVD, I need to you to step away from the pipe....
Speculation on Pirates of the Caribbean and Disney is understandable, but players aren't what will matter to Studios, they make money selling Discs, not on the warm fuzzy feeling that there are more players for their supported Media type.
Unless HD DVD DISC sales, not player sales, increases, HD DVD is doomed. Any Studios exec looking at the sales numbers can see it just as easily as we can, Blu-ray sells more discs.
||Blu-ray Disc enjoys the support of five of the six major studios, while HD DVD is supported by three of them. Three studios -- Sony, Disney and Fox -- are exclusively in the Blu-ray camp, as is mini-major Lionsgate. Paramount and Warner support both formats. Universal is the only major studio to release titles only in the HD DVD format.||
Resource Supply, which represents the largest variable in this war, tells anyone who Objectively views this who is going to win.
What you wrote doesn't make SENSE at all.
First of all, what format sells more copies? That my friend right there is based on how many players you have and how many people watch hi-def movies. By your reasoning if you have 2 million-6 million + players VS 800k players the studios will still sell movies for the 800k players WHY exactly? It's statistics man, the more players out there the more customers it's simple is that. Movie studio is in it for the money dude, it's everything there is. They don't love a format, they love money and with millions of HD-DVD players that are going to hit stores end of this year (some info says even summer) I can GUARANTEE you that you will see Fox and every other "neutral" studio coming out with more and more titles that are HD-DVD exlusive.
Not only that but if you really look at numbers, which nobody is really looking at, most websites including Engadget authors are highly biased towards Blu-Ray, the customer attachment rate to a format is so much more on HD-DVD that there's absolutely NO COMPARISON. There's approximately 4:1 ratio of number of movies per person between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD customer. Do you know what that means? Who has a bigger buying power? Who is more likely to buy a movie, a Blu-Ray customer or HD-DVD? You got it, HD-DVD.
I personally have 8 BDs and 32 HD-DVDs and I was surprised that I'm not really in minority. A LOT of people have bunch of HD-DVD movies. Do you know how many movies per BD player Blu-Ray customers have? 1:1 but worldwide it's around 0.5:1. The numbers for movie sales are skewed because there's MORE PLAYERS out there and not to mention a few titles that came in between HD-DVD releases that spiked Blu-Ray sales (hell I bought a few BD titles in that time period as well). You don't think studios see that? You don't think even electronics companies like Samsung, LG and a few others don't see this? You think that the trend of companies going neutral is good or bad sign for Blu-Ray.
The only 2 studios that will stay BD exclusive will be Sony and MGM. I guarantee you that.
Fox has pulled ALL of their upcoming Blu-Ray titles. and this was just PRIOR to Walmart announcement. They say it's BD Java glitch, but we all know that's not the case. They found out about what's happening, on Chinese front and they got the picture, they will lose money if they stay exclusive.
You need to wake up son.
You are right, I was rude. My apology.
Blah blab blah blah, Yeah all about USA. I live in london I got a ps3 and a 360 addon. I got 30 HD DVD titles and 2 blu-ray titles (1 free with the PS3) why is that? Because it's so fucking hard to find blu-ray in europe and if you do they imported, my PS3 is PAL so I can only watch pal blu-ray. on the other hand HD DVD is region free that means "ebay US heaven". Also do not forget some titles which are blu-ray excl in the US are released from different studio in europe (I said some) like underworld evolution, and a few more. Anyway this war is not over yet, and BDA should get more titles in europe. No good game on PS3(now) and no movie to watch. WTF.
Looking at these figures it seems that the studio support is more significant than the PS3 factor. Not a lot of data to go on but for The Departed Blu-ray outsold HD DVD 5:3, rather than 20:1 as you might expect given the ratio of potential customers out there. It shouldn't be too much of a surprise though that games console owners are less likely to buy DVDs than people who've risked a lot of money on a standalone DVD player with a format that might yet die.
As others have said the studios will go where the money is and right now sales per title are too small to worry about missing out. This won't change until someone manages to sell a million dedicated DVD players. They'll need to be cheap - and HD DVD looks likely to be first out with cheap players - but customers will still need to be persuaded that they aren't going to left with a useless piece of kit. Hence the propaganda war, which Blu-ray is currently winning.
i don't mean to upset all the blu-ray cherleaders here but to me it took ALOT longer then it should have seeing how there has been over 1M PS3s, PC drives, and stand-alone players, and it still took all the way until the end of april. Does not seem impressive.
What is important to me is that the attach ratio that important studios look at. They see HD-DVD owners have multiple HD-DVDs look at what everyone is saying (i have lots of HD-DVD and only like 2 or 3 blu-ray and one was free with it) which means people aren't buying them. People who buy the HD-DVD addon for the 360 specially buy movies for it unlike the ps3 who only may buy 1 or so just to see what the hype is or how cool it looks but if you don't have a high def tv blu-ray does not matter in the least.
Everyone touts about studio support yes that is important but what matters most is the quality of titles. Blu-ray has more movies but they are crap movies i do not want. I have over 30 HD-DVD and want lots more because they have a better selection of movies. Yes i really want to pay $30 for basic instinct 2 and ultraviolet which has no special featues found on the DVD plus they sucked hard.
Can't wait for matrix, LOTR, Heroes, an Battlestar Galactica :-)
all on HD-DVD. Not to mention a plethora of movies.
also opne more thing seeing how HD-DVD outsold blu-ray even for a short bit is a big difference seeing how the ratio of units. So i would stil be worried about blu-ray they should be KILLING hd-dvd in sales. Wait until summer and we will see. The reason blu-ray won the first quater because there wasn't many or if any new releases on certain weeks and it still held their ground despite that fact.
thanks
Who here is waiting for the:
Shaun of the Dead
Hot Fuzz
Exclusive HD DvD releases? I know I am.
Seriously I own a PS3 but BD fanboys are so arrogantly ignorant that I can't help but throw titles like this in your face.
P.S. Hot Fuxx was GREAT! If you haven't seen it yet go watch it. You won't be disappointed if you liked Shaun of the Dead.
Oops typo'd the Hot Fuzz* in the last sentence.
and the pointless flame war rages on.
What HD DVD fans fail to realize is Blu-ray crossed the 1 million mark a month ago. They are past 1.2 million disc sales. HD DVD still isn't at 1 million after more than a year. The gap is getting wider and wider. In Feb., Blu-ray had a 1,000 disc Since Inception sales lead (2 months ago). Then, the gap grew to 40,000 to 135,000, to greater than 262,000 disc sales lead. Plus, this is just the US numbers.
Blu-ray now has the lead on every continent it's in around the world (yes, that includes Europe). If you want to see the big picture, look at the worldwide sales of Blu-ray discs vs. HD DVD discs. That sales gap would be A LOT WIDER than 800,000 discs in Blu-ray's favor. Plus, Blu-ray titles are on average cheaper than HD DVD titles (check eproductwars.com). You can buy a new 1080p Blu-ray player for around $480 shipped from Amazon.
Remember, it is not ration to want to keep the superior technology (check you specs HD DVD fans) from being adopted. I guess the saying is true. Crazy people don't know they're crazy.