Blu-ray and HD DVD are competing for the customers and becoming the next generation optical standard. The market has been swaying back and forth since the start of 2006, but the market shares have always been quite evenly divided, with no end in sight. Marketing analysts at NPD Group have now released sales figures for the last few weeks. The time line goes from the middle of December up until now and there is an interesting change after the first week of 2008 when Warner announced it would ditch HD DVD.
Many feared that this would become a big loss for HD DVD and according to these figures, that’s an understatement of gigantic proportions. The sales week ending January 5th was quite even between Blu-ray and HD DVD. Blu-ray held 51.17% while HD DVD held the remaining 48.83%.
On January 4th, Warner announced it would leave HD DVD and become Blu-ray exclusive, and when you look at the sales of the following week it’s a dramatic change. During week 2, 92.53% of all sold HD players were Blu-ray players and only 7.47% of them were HD DVD players. These figures are only for stationary players and does not include PlayStation 3 or the external Xbox 360 HD DVD player.
It doesn’t look good for HD DVD and considering that Universal Studios is still undecided, we may very well be close to an end to this HD format war.
