In the face of many articles stating that Blu-ray sales have been underwhelming in the first quarter, Scott Hettrick has come out with the opposite view - that Blu-ray sales are surging.

The articles that claim that Blu-ray is stagnant compare February and March sales to January. Scott questions this comparison, suggesting that it is almost always the case that sales drop off in Q1, the end of the holiday and post holiday season.

I would add that January was a big month for Blu-ray, with many people making a move to Blu-ray on the back of Warner’s announcement that they would cease releasing HD DVDs (oddly ending up being the last major supporter of the format). That caused many to get off the fence and into Blu-ray.

Scott suggests that it is more rational to compare the sales with the same period a year ago. In that comparison Blu-ray player sales are in the order of 400% up compared to 2007, and also notes that Playstation 3 are conveniently ignored in the critical articles.

Scott also notes that Blu-ray sales are going from 2% of DVD sales to a projected 8% by years end and that the number of releases in 2008 should eclipse 2007 by the end of Q3, with the Holiday season in Q4 remaining to add a great deal more releases. In new releases we have seen in the order of 6% of DVD sales for Blu-ray.

Perhaps Scott’s view is somewhat overly optimistic and perhaps coloured by writing for a site that is clearly pro Blu-ray. That said I tend to agree that comparing February sales to January is not a fair comparison and that the articles that do this perhaps come from people who just want some sensationalist headlines - everybody loves to read of failure.

However I do tend to also believe that we will see somewhat stagnant player sales, at least amongst those in the know, until we see the full featured standalone units. While we read that the Panasonic BD Live player the DMP-BD50 now has a price, it still has no official date for release.

Until the players can manage to get everything that the Playstation 3 is capable of, I can see that tech heads particularly will lean to the PS3 for their Blu-ray viewing.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Market Share, Players, Retailers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.