VideoScan's High-Def Disc Sales Numbers
I had a couple of folks ping me asking my thoughts about this article over at highdefdigest.com. Specifically, they were curious on my thoughts on the data that seems to show Blu-ray disc sales catching up to HD-DVD disc sales.
The charts in question are below:
I considered writing something earlier, but didn't because unfortunately there's just not enough data to show a trend. All we really can see here are two weeks of sales that seem to show Blu-ray beginning to close the gap in sales. What we really need to see is at least a few months of sales so we can look for trends - and I doubt we'll really get a sense of things until toward the end of the year.
The problem is that there are so many wildcards and unknowns in the equation. Are the increasing Blu-ray sales due to PS3 finally having gone on sale? It's quite possible - certainly some percentage of PS3 owners are interesting and willing in using the system to play Blu-ray discs. What's impossible to measure is how many of those people are buying discs to play because there aren't games, or because they're just curious about Blu-ray? Imagine a hypothetical world where 4-5 AAA PS3 exclusive titles were available at retail. How much would that impact the Blu-ray sales above? My gut is that it would, and significantly... but it's hard to measure.
Another possibility is that the quality of HD-DVD releases just sucked in the period above (I haven't seen any particularly compelling releases lately myself). It's such a short timeframe that it's quite possible that sales dropped to a lack of compelling content. That's another reason we'll need to look over the long haul.
What'll really be telling is what happens over this next year and through holiday. It's certainly possible we'll be seeing price cuts on a variety of high-definition playback devices: stand-alone players, add-ons to consoles, or game consoles themselves. That should help spark disc sales as well, and hopefully help the trendline to be a bit clearer.
The funniest thing? This whole disc-based "battle" is pretty much irrelevent. Five years from now we'll have plenty of options to get high-definition video content over the net, and physical disc-based media will be dead. The real battle is getting the distribution pipelines into place that can deliver high-quality content quickly to consumers, enabling scenarios they both want and can easily use. That's probably a whole other article for the future, but I'll give you a hint - it's one of the reasons I'm so high on Live, and Microsoft's work with IPTV and video distribution on the Xbox. We're just seeing the tip of the iceberg right now. Heck, even my favorite DVD rental provider Netflix is enabling streaming downloads of movies to your home. Whether or not streaming to a PC connected to a TV is the right answer or not (probably not, in my opinion), it's a great experiment. It will be interesting to see where this all evolves to.