Blu-ray is being adopted faster than DVD
By Mike Ferro
It was a stellar holiday season for Blu-ray with movies like The Dark Knight breaking records. According to two research firms, Blu-ray movies and players were top on most holiday shopper’s list. This is pretty much what I predicted a few months back when I compared Blu-ray as this year’s Tickle me Elmo.
According to DVDFile, surveys conducted by both, Greenfield and Zogby International, Blu-ray players and movies were ranked high on holiday shopper’s lists. In the survey conducted by Greenfield, it also indicated that Blu-ray players were number one on the list of HD TV owners. The survey conducted by Zogby revealed similar results ranking Blu-ray players as second on the list after HD TV.
I indicated that there will be a strong correlation between HD TV adoption and Blu-ray, and these two studies definitely show this to be true. Blu-ray sales are starting to eat away at DVD sales, similarly to how DVD sales ate away at VHS sales over 10 years ago. According to Richard Greenfield, analyst for Pali Capital, indicated that results for 2008 are expected to show a decrease in DVD sales by 6%. This is in contrast to original predictions of flat sales for the year.
Greenfield also indicated that the adoption rate for Blu-ray is much faster than DVD was. He states, “Interestingly, two years into the standard DVD cycle, the DVD installed base was only 1.2 million and players were not nearly as inexpensive as $129 [BD players were] on Black Friday.” As indicated before, Blu-ray sales are twice of that of DVDs at the same point in its life.
I predict that the Blu-ray adoption rate is actually much faster than twice that of DVDs when you consider out of the two years on the market, only one year was really spent as the sole format. The first year was spent battling it out with HD-DVD splintering the market in half while leaving many on the fence. This holiday definitely showed that consumers have made the jump to Blu-ray.
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Stumble It!
January 6th, 2009
The truth is – bearing in mind that the multi-million selling PS3 has it built-in – that Blu-ray’sadoption is pretty poor compared to DVD (the DVD equipped PS2 ccame later in DVDs life).