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 FilmsSales 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/564PornThe 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 UnitsAs 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.