The launch of the PS3 introduced a cheap Blu-Ray player to the masses. The 600.00 PS3 (or 500.00 PS3 if you can find one) is considerably less then the 900.00 to 1200.00 price tag of the average Blu-Ray home player which hurt Blu-Ray hardware and software sales badly mid last year. Since the launch of the PS3, Blu-Ray title sales have been climbing and as of late have outpaced HD-DVD. But the latest data is VERY misleading. Blu-Ray is not really outpacing HD-DVD. Sure it has more title sales in the last few months but that is LARGELY due to more titles being available in January and February. The Blu-Ray camp purposely loaded up the first few months of the year in a vein attempt to backup their “SILLY” statements from CES in January where the Blu-Ray Group was claiming that Blu-Ray was the winner over HD-DVD in the Next Generation Optical Disk Format war. During my visits to the Blu-Ray booth at CES in January the group constantly “bragged” about the 50GB capacity of the Blu-Ray Disk as if the capacity by itself is the sole reason that anyone should go with Blu-Ray over HD-DVD. I really could not stand to spend more than 1 minute in their booth before I ran away in total “horror”.
HD-DVD is ONLY available on 30GB disks (51GB disks will debut last this year – but it is not really needed) at the moment and has managed to thoroughly thrash Blu-Ray in the following categories:
1. Image Quality – Thank you VC-1. See the Chronicles of Riddick, Serenity, Batman Begins and The Mummy Returns. Enough SAID!
2. Support for TrueHD as all HD-DVD Players are required to the support the codec while support for Blu-Ray players is optional.
3. Interactive Features such as the “In-Movie Experience”, “Tech Specs” (in movies like Miami Vice and The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift), and the “GPS” to name a few. Blu-Ray Interactive called “BDi” has yet to be implemented on any level.
4. Combo Disk Support – Users without an HD-DVD Player can purchase the HD-DVD Combo Disk and play the Standard Definition version until they purchase an HD-DVD Player. HD-DVD users can share movies with friends without the need to worry about compatibility. Blu-Ray has no plans to support anything of the kind.
5. Cost – HD-DVD Players debuted at a significant lower price than Blu-Ray Players. 500.00 vs. 1200.00 at launch. If you own a 360, upgrading to HD-DVD will only cost you 199.00.
The only “REAL” advantage for Blu-Ray is Studio Support (Fox, Disney, Sony and Columbia Studios are Blu-Ray only, while Universal is HD-DVD only – others are support both formats) which leads us back to the purpose for this article: title sales. As I mentioned earlier Blu-Ray releases for January and February clearly went in Blu-Ray’s favor but the tide is about to change as HD-DVD’s release schedule will pickup starting at the end of this month. Blu-Ray has 265 titles planned for the first six months of this year compared to 257 for HD-DVD. With Blu-Ray blowing part of their wad early, HD-DVD will definitely have some big months coming very soon.
In February Blu-Ray outsold HD-DVD by 2:1 with 250,000 titles sold vs. 125,000 titles sold. These numbers are provided by Video Business who acquires their numbers from Videoscan. Today I asked the HD-DVD group to confirm the numbers. They acknowledged that the numbers are most likely accurate BUT that the numbers do NOT represent all retailers. A closer look at these numbers reveals trouble for Blu-Ray if there so-called good fortune continues. The PS3 and the Blu-Ray home players account for roughly 2 million Blu-Ray Players on the market compared to roughly 200,000 HD-DVD Players (Toshiba Home Player and 360 HD-DVD Drive). If you compare the hardware to title ratio for both formats the numbers look something like this:
- ONLY 1 Blu-Ray title is purchased for every “8 Blu-Ray Players” on the market.
-1 HD-DVD title is purchased for every 1.6 HD-DVD Players on the market.
As you can see, Blu-Ray title sales are down right horrible and the Blu-Ray Camp should be eating crow for all of the smack they talked about the PS3 immediately ending the format war. They should really be ashamed because they have a 10:1 hardware ratio advantage over HD-DVD and cannot even come close to having a 1:1 ratio when it comes to Blu-Ray hardware and Blu-Ray title sales. HD-DVD on the other hand is quickly nearly a 1:1 ratio and would have achieved this goal already if it was not for a weak release schedule for the months of January and February. As Universal and the HD-DVD Group recently stated, you cannot judge the format war by Blu-Ray/HD-DVD title sales of the last few months. With the hardware ratio advantage Blu-Ray has over HD-DVD, Blu-Ray should be leading on some level but in reality it is failing miserably. Other publications and the Blu-Ray Camp have already started to declare Blu-Ray the winner but that is total and absolute NON-SENSE (or lack of common sense) as the war will continue for some time. If consumer education improves HD-DVD should win the war hands down as the format is clearly better in every way imaginable (see reasons 1 thru 5 above) and for the lesser format to win because they have the larger capacity and a half baked console (PS3) is completely BOGUS!