This week’s Nielsen VideoScan numbers from Home Media Magazine show that, for the week ended 3/30, HD DVD faded to 16% of the high-def market, with Blu-ray at 84%. That puts them at 67/33 since inception. But more interesting is that Blu-ray took 8% of the general market, to DVD’s 92%. That’s up from 6% last week. The growing number of day-and-date Blu-ray releases and increased player sales should see Blu-ray continue to gain market share.
A small change in Home Media Magazine reflects the much larger change in the batter for home video. The Nielsen VideoScan pie-charts, which used to show BD vs. HD DVD for the week ended, year-to-date, and since inception now show BD/HD DVD for week-ended and since inception - and the third box is now BD vs. DVD market share for the week ended. For the week ended 3/23 Blu-ray took 88% of the market, to HD DVD’s 12%. With the last of the HD DVD exclusives gone, and an increasing number of small studios canceling their remaining HD DVD titles, the HD DVD percentage should fall off to zero fairly quickly now. Since inception, BD has taken 67% of the market.
The new BD/DVD chart only compares the top 20 titles by unit volume for each format, but BD has 6% of the market to DVD’s 94%. That may not sound like much, but it is pretty good for a fledgling format just coming off the end of a format war that slowed adoption. As more and more major releases hit Blu-ray day-and-date, especially once Universal, Paramount, and DreamWorks Animation start their BD releases, that percentage should rise steadily - give or take a bit each week for variation.
This issue has a lot of BD coverage - the entire front page is BD-related articles. New releases are seeing an increasing percentage of sales on BD. No Country for Old Men saw 9.8% of sales on BD (the rest on DVD), while Hitman saw 12.6% of sales on BD. That compares to levels of 2-3% for most titles during the format war. With the spike in BD growth, one of the articles examines the issues replicators are facing in adopting to BD demand. The up-front investment in a BD production line runs from $1.5 to $1.7 million for a 25GB line to nearly $2.7 million for a 50GB line. Yields of usable discs is now up to around 75%, from only about half early on. But this isn’t dissimilar to what happened with DVD early on, and over time yields will increase and costs will decrease.
New research from Strategy Analytics predicts that Blu-ray will be in 30 million homes by the end of the year, and 132 million by 2012.
Hmm, Home Media Magazine wasn’t out on Friday as it normally is (I’m guessing due to the holiday), but I just checked it and it is up now. For the week ended 3/16 HD DVD took 22% of the market to Blu-ray’s 78%, putting them 76:24 year-to-date and 66:34 since inception. But with the last of the big studio HD DVD releases gone, the best HD DVD placed in the top 10 sellers was ninth, with American Gangster. Tenth also went to HD DVD, with Beowulf. Personally I was happy to see a niche anime title like Appleseed: Ex Machina placing fourth, and selling 12.27% of the volume of first place No Country for Old Men. I’ve read other reports that Appleseed moved roughly 30% of its volume on Blu-ray, the rest being DVD. (It placed 16th on the DVD sellers list.) Which shows that niche markets, like anime fans, tend to be early adopters - anime fans also jumped on LaserDisc and DVD earlier than the general market.
HD DVD is only the latest video media format to land on the junk heap of history. Most of you reading probably know about Betamax, since it has entered the popular lexicon as a synonym for ‘failed format’. But Betamax and HD DVD are hardly alone, and Popular Mechanics has a fun article which covers ten failed video media formats. Read the article and see how many of the formats you were already familiar with. And how many of them did you own?
My answers below.
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It may not be long for this world, but HD DVD had a good week. For the week ending 3/9 it took 35% of the market, to Blu-ray’s 65%. That puts them at 75:25 year-to-date, and 66:34 since inception. Beowulf on HD DVD was once again the top high-def seller, 30 Days of Night on BD took second place with over 80% as many copies, but HD DVD’s American Gangster came in 3rd with nearly 70%.
The Blu-ray vs. HD DVD format war is over, but the fallout and consequences aren’t. And the big loser in the war, Toshiba, is facing the music for their failed campaign. Toshiba started the war in an attempt to increase their consumer electronics market share, but their attempted grab for lebensraum backfired and they’ve been left holding the bill. How large of a bill? According to Japan’s Nikkei business daily Toshiba will have to book a loss of $986 million relating to HD DVD, bringing their full-year profit down to roughly $2.44 billion. That’s certainly not a crippling blow for a company the size of Toshiba, but it certainly isn’t exactly pleasant. And it just goes to show the size of the risk, and the stakes, that where at the core of the format war in the first place.
Via CNET News.com.
As HD DVD plays out its last days on the market, it has had one last shot at the limelight. For the week ended 2/24 HD DVD managed to grab 23% of the high-def market, with Blu-ray taking the other 77%. This makes them 76:24 for the year, and 65:35 since inception. But the real story is American Gangster. It managed to do something HD DVD has done in quite a while, take the top spot for best selling high-def title. In fact, it is the only HD DVD release to make the top 10, outselling second place Blu-ray Michael Clayton 3:2. This is one of the last major HD DVD exclusive blockbuster titles, there aren’t many titles left. And it is possible that some of those announced titles could be dropped, just as Paramount did with their post 3/4 titles.