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!

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"True adaptability involves changing ones self to meet ones environment, not changing ones environment to meet ones needs" - Species8472

Just to play devils advocate (mostly because I myself dont know it all, but enough to make an educated decision) and to just add fuel to a very large fire.....

http://sne.bloggingstocks.com/2007/0...ttle-rages-on/

Considering this came from a stocks blog spot, the chance of it being biased one way or the other is really unlikely. Even so... with all the ranting and raving going on....BD is winning...

Give me a Break

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.

YAH $199.00 except for the fact that you have to have a XBOX360 which is $350.

Xbox 360

350
+ 199
--------
$ 549

PS3 60gb
500
+ 0
--------
$ 500

If you own a PS3 upgrading to a blu-ray player will cost you nothing

and who cares about the debuted price, being that they are about the same now

One thing that really pissed me off this week was the fact the Dreamworks decides to back out on the release of the Bee Movie in HD DVD talk about a huge prick shot.. nothing like thinking about the people who have HD DVD players. All I can say is KISS MY ASS dreamworks

hnmmm, guess this was kinda wrong.
Amazed this site is still alive.

Yeah looks like they were wrong, but blu-ray still hasnt had much luck in market penetration it seems. Over Fifty Percent of Western Europe is living without HDTV, less than Ten Percent have Blu-ray