The advent of fast Internet connections pretty much killed off their porn business, while Blockbuster killed off the rest of the customer base.

The internet wasnt around for the average home user over 25 years ago  

some vhs v beta reads

http://www.totalrewind.org/fmt_war.htm
http://www.betainfoguide.com/RiseandFall.htm

Sony should have immediately realized their error in underestimating the immense importance of the American “bigger, longer, better” mentality  :mrgreen:

Quote from: Jaitsu

HD-DVD seemed to be ahead last time i checked the battle,

Youve not checked for a while then. The Blu-Ray discs are selling at a ratio of nearly 3:1 over HD-DVD - this does of course include PS3s as well as Xbox add on Drive.

But isnt that purely because Sony have pushed all of their films out in the last month or two to cause a market bump in the media?

Bluray was way behind on all markets and then Sony pushed out a few blockbusters on Blu-ray only in the last couple of weeks.  Its an artificial high which is why its only just appeared.  Of course bluray sales will be higher for a couple of weeks when the company promoting it releases their blockbuster season in a couple of months in one format only.

Now theyre out of films itll just slip back to both formats in heads up which unless the world has changed dramatically will just mean HD-DVD again.  If it has changed to bluray its not really a problem as other than costing more theres essentially nothing between the technologies but I just cant see bluray doing it.


Regardless of all the technical stuff.  Come christmas this year peoples parents will walk into shops and buy HD-DVD simply because they have an HD tv and know they want a DVD player.  Bluray was a dumb name

But isnt that purely because Sony have pushed all of their films out in the last month or two to cause a market bump in the media?

Bluray was way behind on all markets and then Sony pushed out a few blockbusters on Blu-ray only in the last couple of weeks.  Its an artificial high which is why its only just appeared.  Of course bluray sales will be higher for a couple of weeks when the company promoting it releases their blockbuster season in a couple of months in one format only.

Now theyre out of films itll just slip back to both formats in heads up which unless the world has changed dramatically will just mean HD-DVD again.  If it has changed to bluray its not really a problem as other than costing more theres essentially nothing between the technologies but I just cant see bluray doing it.


Regardless of all the technical stuff.  Come christmas this year peoples parents will walk into shops and buy HD-DVD simply because they have an HD tv and know they want a DVD player.  Bluray was a dumb name

No. Its been winning the head to head since the turn of the year.
They wont run out of films. Disney is Blu-Ray Only... Universal are the only major player not to have commited to blu-ray.

Quote from: SteveF

No. Its been winning the head to head since the turn of the year.

Thats odd - youve seen some very different numbers to me then...

Considering official figures show there are less ps3/blue ray players then hd-dvd players, interesting figures you seen egg, lol.

There has been well documented issues with manufacture of blue-ray players which only just picked up last month and would back up the sales figures as steve stated and the fact Sony have lowered the price again of theirs (at a loss)

(all of the above you can find dozens of sites stating that and the data(

Ok, I seem to only be able to find official press releases from both companies saying different things.  The HD-DVD groups are giving their numbers as discs sold and the blueray camp saying units shipped.  This is tricky because Sony are shipping PS3s with blu ray discs and promoting rental schemes so they can massively boost their sales by shipping every unit with a disc - the market is small enough that that disc shipping with a PS3 is enough to change the results.  Many of the weekly top 10 listings have sold under a 1000 copies worldwide!!!

So not trusting either company I decided to see if I could get some hard numbers that were independent. The best independent data I could find is


Feature Films
Sales figure percentages from DVD Empire (retailer)
http://www.dvdempire.com/Content/Features/hidef_wars.asp?view=1
                             HD-DVD Sales      Blu Ray Sales
Week of Jun. 19th           43.24%           56.76%
Week of Jun. 12th           27.28%           72.72%
Week of Jun. 05th           29.54%           70.46%
Week of May 29th           38.70%           61.30%
Week of May 22nd           41.04%           58.96%
Week of May 15th           35.41%           64.59%
Week of May 08th           40.92%           59.08%
Week of May 01st           35.98%           64.02%

These sales figures are showing that blu ray is indeed winning in sales.  Egg is right  The sales difference looks to have come largely from three titles: spiderman, casino royale and pirates of the carribean which were released on blu-ray only.  The equivalent HD-DVD only titles (Batman for example) undersold these bluray titles by a HUGE margin.  This means Blu ray are outselling by 1.5:1 with spikes up to 3:1 since the turn of the year.

Sony released their official figures (from Videoscan) for the number of discs sold globally up until the week ending March 18th.  Blu-ray had sold 844,000 discs, HD-DVD had sold 708,600 DVDs total.  Note: This was the week of Casino Royale coming out and selling 100,000 bluray discs
http://hddvd.highdefdigest.com/news/show/Sony/Disc_Sales/Sony_Report_Reveals_First_Look_at_Absolute_Blu-ray_and_HD_DVD_Disc_Sales_Figures/564


Porn
The above data comes from DVD Empire which doesnt shift porn.  I cant seem to get any reasonable numbers on how many units the porn industry shifts in comparison to the movie studies in HD content.  So you can probably add a couple of percent to the HD colomn but not much.  I cant find any hard numbers but the total sales of HD content is very low so either porn will be a tiny percent of the market (scaling properly) or a massive percentage of the total sales (as the feature film market is tiny).

If anyone can find any info on this then thatd help.  (Im on lunch break but at work so have to be careful what I search for lol).


Hardware Units
As Microsoft arent shifting their HD drives yet there are significantly more blu ray players around than HD DVD players.  Hard figures are difficult to pin down but it looks like there are around 3 blu ray players for each HD DVD player.

Most of the Blu ray players are in the form of PS3s right now and most HD-DVD players are seperate units.  Surveys of PS3 users seem to show almost all of their users have their PS3s connected to a HD-TV and have either bought or intend to buy movies on Blu ray.  They could be described as early adopters.  The PS3 ships with Blu ray discs or has vouchers to redeem/buy them in most countries.


Summary
* the worldwide market for HD-DVD discs is tiny with many titles selling less than 1000 a week and topping the sales charts.

* On an even market blu ray discs are outselling HD-DVD at about 1.5:1

* Bluray supporting studios seem to be putting out more high quality content which is making the sales spike regularly to almost 3:1 sales advantage.  For once, content may be the deciding factor rather than anything else.

* There are around 3 times more Bluray players around than HD-DVD players.

* The sales of these discs are so low its insane.  The people are quoting percentages because the number of discs being sold is near trivial (this suprised me).


On the basis of the above I was wrong.  Neither format has won, simply because not enough discs are being sold by either.  There arent enough HD-DVD players on the ground yet.  Bluray have a larger install base of 3:1 and are outselling discs at 2:1.  Assuming not all PS3 users are buying films that probably puts both disc formats at the same level of hardware to discs sold.

Shipping PS3s with vouchers to buy Bluray discs is skewing the data quite a lot as best I can tell but theyre still sales as noone can deny youre paying for the discs in the PS3 purchase price.

The deciding factor will be the hardware install base.  It looks like the first player to £200 in time for christmas wins.