DVD sales plunge while Blu-ray sales fester
There is increasing evidence that consumers are slowly but surely moving away from buying DVDs in the numbers they once did. A victory for Blu-ray perhaps? No, not really, as even though sales are up by a substantial percentage, there’s a huge gap between the drop in the DVD market and the gain in the Blu-ray market.
Most industry watchers realized that as soon as Blu-ray won the high-def format war over HD DVD that it faced a new battle, one that would be a lot harder to win. This would be a battle fought on two fronts: against the continuing popularity of DVD, and the burgeoning sector of digital downloads.
It could be argued that the digital downloads battle hasn’t yet truly begun, with it still being a relatively small sector of the market. But the DVD battle began the moment Blu-ray killed off HD DVD, and it has to be concluded that DVD is still winning the fight at this moment in time.
According to The Register, new sales figures released by The British Video Association (BVA) last week show quite how large the uphill battle faced by Blu-ray is. In the UK, DVD sales are down by a whopping 9.5 percent during the first six months of 2009. While year-on-year sales of Blu-ray discs are up 231 per cent.
Which sounds impressive until you look at the numbers involved. Despite the drop, there were still 99.6 million DVDs sold in the UK between January and June. While the same period saw Blu-ray sales stand at just 3.1 million, which is massively up on the 1.3 million of a year ago but which is still a tiny percentage of DVD sales.
The BVA stated:
The continuing success of Blu-ray is testament to the growth of consumer confidence in the high-definition format.
Possibly. Maybe. But that small percentage gain isn’t really anything to write home about, especially when it fails to make up for the huge drop in DVD sales. The recession is surely to blame for a large part of this drop in consumer spending, and the fact that sales of Blu-ray discs are continuing to rise even in these times of economic pressure is quite positive. But overall, this looks pretty grim for the industry as a whole.
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July 6th, 2009
How can DVD be winning the fight (if there really is a fight) if it’s revenues are dropping whilst Blu-Ray’s are climbing?
Does anyone have any recent figures for these movie downloads that are supposed to be taking over? I know last year they were less than half a percent of the whole market, up 66% on the 2007, so I suspect they’ll make Blu-Ray look like a runaway success in comparison, in both absolute sales and market increase.
July 6th, 2009
Between downloads, Sky’s DVR TV service and the non-Sky DVRs it’s easy to see why DVD sales are on a slow slide.
The big surprise is that Blu-ray has taken only 3% of the market despite those 2.2 million PS3s that have been sold.
If the PS3 owners aren’t even bothering they really are in trouble.
July 6th, 2009
I wonder how much of it is down to people buying so many DVDs in the good times that, now belts are tightening, people have so many unwatched movies on their shelves that they can get by without buying new ones.
July 6th, 2009
Another factor not mentioned so far is that perhaps the quality of the product is deteriorating so people are less interested in buying it. Quality movies are harder and harder to find.
As Hollywood thinks mostly in terms of remakes, sequels, and “safe bets” for commercial success, they move to more formulaic movies that are as a whole uninspiring. While adequate to watch once, those films aren’t anything I’d want to see again later. So we don’t buy the DVDs.
That and the recession are the main factors I’d point to.
July 6th, 2009
There’s also the problem that quite a lot of high definition transfers don’t look that great in the first place and end up looking little better than the upscaled DVD.