Tracking HD DVD sales
I’ve been sick the last few days (it wouldn’t be a holiday if I didn’t spend it miserable), so I’ve been catching up on the news of the week. It’s not really news, it’s like updates to old news. The Blu-ray side is claiming leadership in Europe with 73% of the high-def market there selling over 1,000,000 movies and 20,000,000 Blu-ray Discs of all media (presumably PS3 games and R/RE media – which still seems pretty high). They’ve also boasted about the 2:1 sales lead they maintain in the States. On the other side, the HD DVD PR Group has announced a total of 750,000 players, including the Xbox add-on. I found that a little strange because they have usually left out the add-on numbers and focused on the standalone sales. A couple weeks ago they boasted they were “near” 500,000 standalone player sales. Perhaps they didn’t get to that number yet so they went with the more impressive number of 750,000 hoping you would get confused and think they were still talking about standalone players (as one Twice reporter did).
I’ve frequently been confused with numbers from both sides because they might claim one thing and the next month another. So I’ve tried to gather as many sources as I could to track 2007 sales for HD DVD. This list may not be exhaustive, but I did my best.
| Date | Xbox Add-on | Standalone | Total |
| 14-Dec-06 | 42,000 | – | – |
| 8-Jan-07 | 92,000 | 83,000 | 175,000 |
| 17-Apr-07 | – | 100,000 | – |
| 11-Jun-07 | – | 150,000 | – |
| 25-Jun-07 | 155,00 | – | ~350,000 |
| ?-Sep-07 | 210,000 | – | – |
| 1-Nov-07 | – | 330,000* | – |
| 8-Nov-07 | – | 420,000 | – |
| 27-Nov-07 | – | – | 750,000 |
*Based on 8 November numbers minus 2 November sales
I probably missed some announcements considering they come out every couple weeks, if you know any more let me know and I’ll add them to the list. I hate making HTML tables, so I’m glad this post it through.
So much spin from both sides makes my head hurt.
So does Blu-Rays sales count PS3 games as well, that seems a little underhanded.
Blu-ray states when they are including PS3 games or not. It’s not wrong to count PS3 games as a Blu-ray Disc because they are BD media. DVD wasn’t just movies either. But the latest announcement was clear on “1 million movie sales” and “20 million total discs sold” (not direct quotes).
It seems Blu-ray has an advantage here because HD DVD seems to have gone back to the original “V” from DVD – Video. It’s now “Versatile” but HD DVD doesn’t have anything but video currently.