Nielsen VideoScan High-Def market share for week ending August 3rd, 2008
By Ben Drawbaugh 
posted Aug 12th 2008 5:44PM
posted Aug 12th 2008 5:44PM
Both DVD and Blu-ray are up on this week's Nielsen VideoScan charts courtesy of our friends at Home Media Magazine. The interesting thing this week is that Blu-ray managed a 10 percent share against the top 20 DVDs, but the two biggest titles on both formats Blu-ray didn't fair as well. The comedy Harold & Kumar was number one on the DVD charts, but the HD version only managed to steal about 7 percent away from DVD. Meanwhile the latest Stargate, was easily the number one title on Blu-ray -- and was barely surpassed on DVD -- but the HD version still didn't manage 10% of the market. This of course means that a few catalog titles made up the difference for 'ol Blu, and most of that money went to Paramount. In fact four Paramount catalog titles made the Blu-ray top 20, including Top Gun which was at number six and our personal favorite, The Hunt for Red October at nine. No way can either format see another increase next week though, as the slate of titles was anything but impressive. But if you look much further in the future into October and beyond, we really can't wait to see how Blu-ray sells through this holiday season when the true market indicators are exposed.
yeah these are pointless until the big summer movies start coming out on BD.
Not to mention the slew of super high profile catalogue titles like James Bond and Godfather. :)
iron man
DVD ftw
I hope 'Dark Knight' on Blu-Ray is the equivalent of 'The Matrix' on DVD... That big title that sells loads and announces the format's entrance into the mainstream. :)
If your hoping for that, you better start hoping for cheap sub $200.00 profle 2.0 players pre-release of Dark Knight. With the current semi-recession in the United States its hard to convince people to buy into high tech electronics at Blu-rays current price point unless they have cash to burn.
I'm no economist, but I suspect this recession is just starting to turn around.
I think the housing market will still be tanked for a while, but:
- Gas prices have been falling (slowly, but surely) for a few weeks now. A barrel of crude peaked at $147 mid-July, and now it's down to about $113. Still a high price, to be sure...but down almost 25%! Where I live in California, i was seeing gas as high as $4.71 a month or so ago...down below $4.30 today. I suspect we'll be below $4 soon. I really hope we get below $3 not too long after that.
- Cheaper gas would mean that food prices might settle down too (food has to be shipped, etc.). Although the whole "lets use our corn to make ethanol" problem will still exist, keeping food prices a bit higher than they should be.
- There've been a few reports lately of the US dollar gaining ground with respect to the Canadian dollar, the Euro, and the Yen...this has more to do with those other economies weakening a bit, but imported goods (like electronics) should start to look a bit cheaper as a result.
I think Iron Man will be Blu-ray's "Matrix"
Dark Knight will just be icing on the cake.
The reason Harold & Kumar didn't sell so well on Bluray is because it wasn't a very visually intense movie. Like Alex said above, We'll start to really see how well bluray has been adopted when the action-packed summer flicks make it to Bluray/DVD. I for one plan on holding off on purchasing The Dark Knight until I have a Bluray player, because I'd like to avoid buying it twice.
Didn't Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo feature a lot of naked ladies? Full frontal even? Visually intense indeed!
If the numbers are correct, consumers spent 134.35 million altogether. According to the diagram, 9.42m is 10% of 134.35m. Nice.
ateneum,
We go through this almost every week but here it is one more time.
The pie chart showing 10% for blu-ray is the percentage of sales for only the top 20 titles. You take the number of discs sold in the top 20 for DVD and compare against the top 20 for blu-ray and you get the 10%/90% percentage. This is UNIT volume and not revenue. This is considered important as the vast majority of sales for movies come from the top 20.
The dollar figures are revenue numbers and can be compared directly to each other.
The 10% is actually the comparison of overall sales of the top 20 titles in each format. In terms of total BD and DVD spending, Blu-ray has 6.5% of the overall market this week: 9.42 / (9.42+124.93).
I'm glad to see Mr. E can now do simple statistics.
Hmm, three of the last four weeks have shown faster growth for Blu-ray than DVD. Still needs to be better than that, especially considering BD users should be more interested in replacing their older DVDs than, well, DVD users and therefore should always show disproportionate growth, but it's certainly better news for BD than the last three or so months.
Doesn't change my overall assessment that the format has no long term viability, but it might give it a big enough boost that the studios realize they have everything to lose if Blu-ray doesn't get more significant traction, and therefore they start working on fixing the myriad of gotchas with the format.
Define long-term, please. A 10-15 year life for Blu-ray, followed by a new 1080p & lossless audio solid state format would be just fine by me.
Lionsgate's revenue is up this quarter over last year, directly attributed to Blu-ray sales. That's really all the studios care about--reversing the decline in revenues from DVD. As long as that keeps up, Blu-ray is in good shape.
I see Blu-ray limping along for the next three to five years, unless it has drastic changes.
Things BD needs to survive:
1. Standardization. All players need to play all Blu-ray discs and access all features of those discs. This means Profile 2.0 support, support for writable media, etc.
2. Reliability. All players need to play all Blu-ray discs. This, in practice, means the deprecation of BD+.
3. Upgrades to integrate cleanly into a future that's clearly going to be online. This means, initially, standardized download-and-burn discs, with standardized media stores following shortly. It also means mandatory managed copy, no "We'll leave it off some earlier disks", if a disk doesn't have it right now it should be officially withdrawn.
In practice, I don't see these changes as happening without a simultaneous branding change so people don't see "Blu-ray disc" as being the amorphic quality it is right now.
Ironically, all these features above (other than speculation about the future) were in HD DVD. The format was standardized. It didn't have BD+. It had a standardized download-and-burn format (HD DVD-R DL, not to be confused with dual layer), and mandatory managed copy was in there from the start. Like I've said in other threads, it's kind of like a 747 and a Ford Pinto were in a race across the Atlantic. Just because the 747 (HD DVD) has withdrawn doesn't mean the Pinto stands a chance in hell without massive modifications.
squig,
"1. Standardization. All players need to play all Blu-ray discs and access all features of those discs. This means Profile 2.0 support, support for writable media, etc."
I have a first generation Toshiba DVD player. Know what, it does not read any burned discs! This idea that all players need to support every feature is hogwash. I have yet to use any of the whiz-bang features on either blu-ray or hd dvd that made the features worth having. As long as the picture and sound are top notch then you can keep the rest.
"2. Reliability. All players need to play all Blu-ray discs. This, in practice, means the deprecation of BD+."
Please provide information on this rash of players that do not play blu-ray discs. Especially any that have not been fixed in firmware.
"3. Upgrades to integrate cleanly into a future that's clearly going to be online. This means, initially, standardized download-and-burn discs, with standardized media stores following shortly. It also means mandatory managed copy, no "We'll leave it off some earlier disks", if a disk doesn't have it right now it should be officially withdrawn."
The whole download-and-burn issue is a question for the studios. This has been implemented on DVDs for a couple of years now and there is almost zero interest in it. The studios don't trust it and the average Joe does not want to bother with it. The price for a d&b DVD is often more than the packaged media.
Managed copy is also a question for the studios. It is their IP and their choice to allow you to copy it or not. It is still not 'legal' in the US to copy DVDs. As long as the studios can get congress to back them up on this idea then you should not expect the right to make back-ups.
So, out of the three points you made, only the first one is with the format. The second one is with the CE companies and the third one is with the Studios.
Quote: I have a first generation Toshiba DVD player. Know what, it does not read any burned discs! This idea that all players need to support every feature is hogwash.
The logic here isn't working. First generation DVD players were made at a time when writable DVDs didn't exist. They didn't even exist on paper. DVD-R didn't appear until years afterwards. So your player couldn't have supported the spec, even if it wanted to. Moreover, you would be in a minority today claiming that it's acceptable for a DVD player to be unable to play writable DVDs. It's definitely unacceptable for anything intended to replace DVD to not support writable media.
Quote: Please provide information on this rash of players that do not play blu-ray discs. Especially any that have not been fixed in firmware.
The problem is BD+. It's caused problems already with early BD+ releases not playing on a number of Blu-ray players. It will get worse as time goes on, as the market is flooded with the low cost players needed to make Blu-ray affordable and more viable. The system is simply unscaleable.
Your last sentence actually reflects the problem with BD+: It requires constant firmware updates to ensure a legitimate Blu-ray player can play all BD+ disks. This isn't something people are going to stand for if the format is to be viable. BD+ is livable with at the moment because there are very few players, and both manufacturers and studios are, to some extent, willing to work together to make it work. Anyone producing a premium Blu-ray player that cannot play "Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer" in 2008 is, obviously, going to suffer. Anyone doing the same thing in some hypothetical near future where sub-$200 Blu-ray players can be found at every Wal-Mart, and where the blame can be simply shifted to the studio (which are you going to return?) will be wasting their money.
BD+ is a disaster waiting to happen. And it's not as if the warnings haven't sounded since it first started being used.
Quote: The whole download-and-burn issue is a question for the studios.
These are ALL QUESTIONS FOR THE STUDIOS. The question is do they want Blu-ray to actually be relevant or not? Download and burn is an important step towards making it that. And claiming the studios aren't interested in it when there's zero equipment available that actually does it is a remarkable extrapolation!
Quote: Managed copy is also a question for the studios. It is their IP and their choice to allow you to copy it or not. It is still not 'legal' in the US to copy DVDs. As long as the studios can get congress to back them up on this idea then you should not expect the right to make back-ups.
Do you even know what Managed Copy is?
Quote: So, out of the three points you made, only the first one is with the format. The second one is with the CE companies and the third one is with the Studios.
All have to do with the format, and all but the first have to do with the studios. Blu-ray needs all of these issues addressed to be viable. All Blu-ray players need to be compatible with all Blu-ray media. BD+ needs to be removed. Managed copy and download-and-burn need to be standardized and implemented so that the format can remain relevant.
Oh, and the prices need to fall, but that's a given.
If, in three years, your $200 Blu-ray player can only play physical disks you've bought from the shop (and even those it often can't play properly) then it's hard to see how it'll be so compelling over, say, the - by then - HD download services. This competition is being introduced today. Some of the services aren't great in terms of how they work on a technical level (Netflix's Roku box), others work great but have unfriendly business models (AppleTV.) But they're all being worked on, and it's highly improbable we'll be having the same problems with downloads that we're having right now.
It needs to be fixed. Otherwise we're all going to skip right over Blu-ray. It'll limp along for three years, and die for the next two. A Laserdisc for the 21st Century.
An impressive week considering the titles released.
I'm also hopful for The Dark Knight's IMAX Blu-Ray release being a good reason for more people to want to get into Blu-Ray but I still think the player prices need to come down. Not that anyone will use the 2.0 features but knowing that you don't have an outdated player boost confidence in the purchase.
being not able to use 2.0 isn't what worries me about buying a 1.1 player running into possible java issues on the new disc's is what worries me about the older players.
That would only affect the non-movie features on the disc.