Casino Royale, the top seller for the first quarter, did much to advance Blu-ray's popularity
The scales have tipped in the hi-def format war, and the advantage is now all Blu-ray's. According to recent sales data provided by Home Media Magazine and Nielsen VideoScan, Blu-ray is beating HD-DVD by a substantial margin of 70%-30% within the first quarter of 2007.
The figures cite that 1.2 million high-definition discs were purchased from January 1st to March 31st, but of those purchases, 832,530 units were Blu-ray while 359,300 were of HD-DVD format. In terms of total units sold since the initiation of both formats, Blu-ray has sold 1.2 million units while HD-DVD has sold 937,500.
Although HD-DVD held an edge over its rival as late as Q4 2006, the balance of power showed a major shift earlier this year. As GamePro previously reported back in February, the HD home media market began to show signs of significant change as Blu-ray began outselling HD-DVD at a rate of 2 to 1. Within the following month, Blu-ray began outselling HD-DVD at a rate of nearly 3 to 1, or more specifically, 335,980 Blu-ray discs to 119,570 HD-DVDs.
In instances when a specific video title was offered initially in both formats, research shows that Blu-ray has consistently come out on top. Sales data for the film The Departed states that, when released simultaneously on February 13th, consumers purchased 53,640 copies of the Blu-ray edition while 31,590 were sold to HD-DVD users.
Given that the majority of the major film studios are currently backing Blu-ray -- some exclusively -- some analysts predicted HD-DVD to go by the way of Sony's Betamax as early as 2008, but recent sales figures indicate that the toppling of HD-DVD has come much sooner than expected. So far, Universal is the only major studio that caters exclusively to the HD-DVD format, as it claims that the discs are easier and cheaper to produce.
