First off I guess I should apologize for not posting so much news this last couple of weeks.
I have been on a vacation with the family for a couple of weeks, lots of fun, and more recently working on new features for the Blu-ray Stats site.
I have added two new pages to the Statistics section of the site.
The pages work much like the current Statistics page, except the filters and information in the table are different.
The Review Stats page focuses on the disc review performance and allows you to narrow down choices based on the reviews that we link to on the details page.
On the plus side, the site was mentioned in postings on CNET Crave and Gizmodo today.
On the down side, the extra traffic generated by these incoming links has given grief to the server.
If things don’t improve over the next couple of days I will talk with my provider about adding ‘more power’ on the server side.
I have finished some initial work on a ‘My Blu-ray Stats’ feature for the site.
The first feature enabled for My Blu-ray Stats is the Collection - a very simple tool that allows you to enter your collection and look at the stats of the discs you specifically own.
A couple of improvements were added when the new database went online a couple of days ago.
The first is improved audio filtering. Now when you filter for a given selection you will see everything that matches, instead of only exact matches - this is especially useful for filtering on ‘Lossless’ - a term that covers LPCM, DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby True HD discs. You can also filter on 24 bit and 6.1 or 7.1 channels, seeing all audio codecs that satisfy the match.
The more observant Blu-ray Stats users will have noticed that the navigation bar now takes you to a new page for displaying the disc statistics.
While things look very similar to the original page, the underlying database for this new page is also completely new, and designed to be more flexible and to have many more fields on which to search and filter. You can get an idea of some of these fields if you look at the details page for one of the discs. I have been working on the new database for months to ensure best possible accuracy for the new data as well as the best match back to the old database.
Today I updated the Amazon Stats page with a new details page that is linked from the title in the Amazon Stats listing.
The biggest advantage of the Amazon Stats page over the main database is that it lists many of the upcoming titles as well as the ones already available.
Sorry there has not been a lot of news today. I have spent most of the day working on the code for the Blu-ray Stats site, more specifically the Imports section.
Today the old Import section was removed (though it is still online) from the navigation bar and the new UK imports section is now active. The selection of titles is considerably wider and English language support is assumed since the Brits for the most part need it as much as we do in the USA.
A second addition is a details page for both the UK Imports and the Amazon UK pages. This page shows large cover images where available as well as title details including director and actor information where available from Amazon. I expect to add this type of details page to the Amazon US, Amazon France and Amazon Germany pages very soon.
I also expect to add support for German and French imports again, though I have yet to decide how best to incorporate those into the new structure.
In any case, enjoy the new pages and feel free to contribute ideas, complaints and comments on this post, at the forum or at the site email addresses.
In this week’s Home Media Magazine we see that Blu-ray gained a little over last week compared to DVD sales, and slipped a little against HD DVD.
No doubt thanks to strong Blu-ray sales of I am Legend, the Blu-ray Top 20 titles week ending March 30 sold 8% versus the Top 20 DVD titles for the week. Against HD DVD the ratio was 84:16, with the ratio since inception remaining at 67:33. It will be interesting to see the impact of I am Legend when it gets its HD DVD release, since it will no doubt be a desirable title for HD DVD owners, but finding one to buy is becoming increasingly difficult as retailers move away from the format.
I am Legend easily led the top 10 followed by No Country for Old Men and Enchanted. Other recent titles in the top 10 were Gone Baby Gone and Hitman. The remainder was rounded out by strong selling Disney catalogue titles including the first two Pirates of the Caribbean, Cars and Apocalypto, as well a surprise entry by Terminator 2, one of the Lionsgate lauch titles. All in all a good week for Disney with 7 of the top 10 titles this week.
Another surprise was the return of the combined HD DVD / BD top 10 and the top 5 per format. Adding on the HD DVD sales for the titles, the Planet Earth series made it to the top 10, as well as the newly released Digital Video Essentials Basics title.
Also a little bit of site news today - the home page has been updated to include the new Blu-ray versus DVD market share statistic. Once we get a few more weeks of these the market share page will start to reflect this as well. The older market share page will be archived for reference.
The Market Share page has been updated to a more readable ‘calendar’ style format.
There is also now a detail page for each week that shows the market share pie charts and where available the top 10 titles.
I guess this information will become less relevant over time with the expectation that Blu-ray will move to dominate the market share as HD DVD is phased out. None the less we will track this information and archive the historical results.
