Marti's blog

It seems as if everyone and his dog has taken a stand on the ongoing HD disc battle. Since I've been following it for a while I might as well give it a shot myself ! First a disclaimer: I own neither formats and still make do with my old CRT TV from 1999.

Let's sum up the situation :

• Video manufacturer support : Blu-Ray can count on about all the big names (Pioneer, Samsung, LG, Sharp, Panasonic, Philips and of course Sony). HD DVD is pretty much Toshiba only. LG has a dual-format player.
• Console support : the Playstation 3 has built-in Blu-Ray while the XBox 360 can get a cheap add-on for HD DVD
• Studio support : Fox, Disney, Sony and their related studios are only releasing titles on Blu-Ray. Universal is standing behind HD DVD. Warner and Paramount support both format.
• Pricing : discs are sold at comparable prices, however Toshiba with HD DVD has the cheapest player which can be found at less than $350 (and less than $200 for the XBox 360 add-on). To get on the Blu-Ray train, the cheapest option is a Playstation 3 at $599, although the first Samsung player (which is getting a bit "old" now) can be found for less than $500. Ouch !
• Quality : both format support the exact same codecs, and while Blu-Ray has more capacity, encoding quality is mostly a matter on how much efforts the editor is putting in. No significant difference to look for here.

So at this point it seems that Blu-Ray enjoys a far superior industry support for both content and hardware. However, these companies have mostly waited for the Playstation 3 to come out to start really working on the format and releasing movies. This has given the HD DVD camp about 6 months head start, which is significant.

So how does this looks right now ? Well it seems that Sony's plan is working quite nicely, as the 2 million sold Playstation 3 have de-facto installed 2 million Blu-Ray players in people's houses. While many people will never use them to watch movies, some do and this seems to have been enough to revert the situation :

• According to eProductWar (which tracks Amazon discs sales), Blu-Ray movies are now clearly and consistently outselling HD DVD since the beginning of 2007. We not know however by how much.
• DVD Empire publish it's own sales statistics, they show pretty much the same thing. Right now sale ratio is given at 1.5:1 for 2007.
• Nielsen Videoscan, which tracks video sales on the US market, also points out that Blu-Ray movies are outselling those on HD DVD.
• In Japan it seems that Blu-Ray is king : in fact Japanese consumers like disc-based digital recorders and have been enjoying Blu-Ray video recorders way before the current movie format was finished.

From there, if I'd have to pick a winner, Blu-Ray seems like an obvious choice. However the war is not yet over, and the Blu-Ray camp has two important issues. First one is that Universal is still not willing to release anything on this format, and they own some seriously good movies. Second, they have no cheap player. For some reason, no manufacturer has gone after Toshiba's cheap player. Maybe they do not want to end-up competing against the Playstation 3, or maybe they want to keep good margins with high-end hardware, but either way it doesn't help.