Spider-Man III sales are just in and show that 130,000 copies of the film were sold in the Blu-ray format in the first six days. This makes it the biggest selling Blu-ray title to date, but falls short of the record held by the Transformers movie in the HD DVD format which sold 190,000 discs. in the same amount of time
Toshiba reportedly sold approximately 90,000 HD-A2 players last weekend, fueled by the drop in price to under $100.00. This shows that there is a thriving market for the High Definition formats and the only thing holding consumers back is the high cost involved with the TVs and players.
Personally I cant wait for the cuts seen in the US markets to be replicated here in the UK, the market is there, it just needs to be made available to the average person.
Toshiba’s entry-level HD-A2 HD DVD was the first to be under the $200.00 mark in the US, but ‘Best Buy’ & Wal-Mart have just announced that they will now be selling the unit for under $100.00. Unfortunately there is not yet any sign of consumers in the UK being able to pick up players at these prices, but its a good sign that prices are dropping making HD technology more available to the paying public.
Research just released by Home Media Research shows that Blu-ray has out sold HD DVD up to the 3rd quarter of the year. The research was carried out in the US only but shows that approximately 2.6 million Blu-ray discs were sold against just 1.4 million HD DVD discs during this period.
Analysts believe the HD DVD format will make a comeback in the last quarter of the year, especially after movie releases such as ‘Transformers’ which sold over 100,000 HD-DVDs on its first day of release (16th October).