Originally posted by: lordjedi

This site http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/questex/hom080507/index.php would disagree with you. Since inception, the market has been at a steady 60:40 Blu-Ray to HD-DVD. Some weeks the numbers go up, others they go down, so it's been pretty balanced. 40% may not sound like much, but even if only 100,000 players have been sold between the two, that gives HD-DVD 40,000 players. The market is far from decided.

What other retailers, besides Blockbuster, have stopped selling HD-DVD? Blockbuster is the only one I know of. Target is scheduled to have an endcap of Blu-Ray players for the Christmas season, but Walmart is going to have an exclusive HD-DVD display.

Both Microsoft and Sony essentially dumped cheap players, at a loss, on the market. Or do you really think that a PS3 only cost $600 to produce when every other BD player at the time was pushing $1000? Everyone with a PS3 and everyone with an XBox 360 with the HD-DVD add on is watching movies on their respective formats.

Until I found that site, which was linked from blu-ray.com, I thought HD-DVD was surely dead. Now, I'm not so sure. Depending on what happens this Christmas, they both might be around for a long time to come.

Well, 60-40 is not totally accurate. True, a "total disks sold since the format's debut" is actually 60-40 in favor of Blu Ray--but thats because HD-DVD was around for months before Blu Ray, giving it not only a big head start but a head start with zero competition, so it racked up a big number of sales stats. A truer indicator of trends is the weekly and monthly stats. Browsing through the Nielsen Videoscan sales numbers for the month of July you get a much wider gap: week one 66-34 in favour of Blu Ray, week two 61-29, week three 74-26, week four 66-34. The "sales since inception" numbers are decieving because HD-DVD was the sole HD format long before Blu Ray showed up. The stats for this year are actually 67-34, which shows how things have averaged out once Blu Ray showed up, and the weekly/monthly numbers are usually slanted more towards a 70-30 margin, with 75% figures not being uncommon for Blu Ray. If you look at the trend it was 60-40 in favor of HD-DVD when Blu Ray first came out, 50-50 last christmas, then 60-40 in favor of Blu Ray in the spring and now since the summer its edging towards a 70-30 gap. It just keeps growing.

And although its true that Sony is probably taking some losses in its PS3, thats really nothing at all compared to HD-DVD. Number one, a PS3 costs about $600, while the XBOX with add on is about $500 altogether, but then its more costly for Microsoft to manufacture two seperate pieces of equipment, so its more costly to begin with and a solid $100 bucks less (and I think more now). So those losses are greater, right off the bat, but thats not the primary issue. The primary issue is that Toshiba's players are $300 right now--thats an enormous loss, about half the selling price of Blu-Ray players. Although Sony is going for some loss with the PS3, Microsoft has encurred bigger losses with its XBOX and even more significantly Toshiba is suffering huge losses, so much greater that to compare it to Sony is pretty inapt. And even though Sony may be taking a bit of a sting in the hopes of it paying off later (which it seems to have as many Blu Ray buyers are PS3 owners), but Sony is not the sole manufacturer of Blu Ray--if they lose out, which they aren't, then it doesn't matter because there is a half dozen other manufacturers like Pioneer. HD-DVD on the other hand, aside from the XBOX, does not have third-party manufacturers--Toshiba is at such great losses that no other partner could compete. How could anyone else hope to make $300 players? It would bankrupt the company. Toshiba can do it because they are in partnership with Mircrosoft and thats all thats keeping them from being ruined. But the players sales are still doing terrible; thats why they cut the price in half, but even this can't save it because at the end of the day paying an extra $300 is not important for a long range investment in a great new format, and thats why people shell out a couple bucks more for Blu Ray.
The HD-DVD Promotional Group initially hoped to sell 2.5 million units by the end of the year--but sales were so bad they cut prices in half and then hoped to make half that initial number; now they've revised that, hoping not to break 1.8 million units but to cross the 1 million barrier, which it looks like they may not even accomplish! I would say thats pretty embarassing. So the hardware sales are proportional to the abysmal software sales.

Additionally, as I pointed out, many retailers aren't stocking HD-DVD anymore. Target isn't, BJ's Wholesale Club isn't and Blockbuster won't carry them, which is huge. And as this happens, the HD-DVD sales figures will continue to plummet and more stores will stick with Blu Ray only. As for Walmart, they carry HD-DVD and had an HD-DVD display earlier this summer but they carry Blu Ray too, and actually it looked to me that they had more Blu Ray titles in stock, and certainly much more players available (fitting since there are so many different models, whereas HD-DVD only has what Toshiba makes--which is another huge strain on an already KO'd company).

Don't be fooled, HD-DVD lost this format war a number of months ago. When the Blu-Ray exclusive Close Encounters delux edition comes out this christmas along with Blu Ray versions of the Matrix trilogy, Spiderman Trilogy and Blade Runner Final Cut, you will see these 70-30 figures spike up closer to 80-20.