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Blu-ray’s Four-Year Surge Starts Now

Aug 21, 2008  •  Post A Comment

Blu-ray discs will outsell standard DVDs in the U.S. by a 3-to-2 margin by 2012 as Blu-ray player prices fall, retailers clear more space for the format and more people use videogame consoles and other devices to watch the high-definition discs, according to a report released this week.
Blu-ray will overtake standard DVDs as the primary form of content software within the next four years, accounting for 61% of the U.S. DVDs sold by 2012, U.K.-based consultant Futuresource says. Such growth will easily outpace that in western Europe, where Blu-ray will account for between 39% and 50% of DVD sales by 2012, according to the report.
In June, trade group Entertainment Merchants Association said U.S. Blu-ray revenue will reach $9.5 billion by 2012.
“Much of the drive behind this increase is coming from growing consumer awareness and falling hardware prices, coupled with PlayStation 3 owners increasingly using their consoles for video playback,” Futuresource analyst Jack Wetherill said in a statement.
With Sony’s Blu-ray format emerging as the victor in the high-definition disc war over Toshiba’s competing HD DVD, such accelerated growth has already begun. Blu-ray’s share of U.S. DVDs sold for best-selling titles will double to as much as 12% by the end of the year, as retailers are likely to drop Blu-ray player prices to as low as $250 by the holiday season, Mr. Wetherill says. Blu-ray disc unit sales this year will jump fivefold from 2007, Futuresource said.
U.S. revenue from Blu-ray sales and rentals for the first half of the year was more than $200 million, representing a 300% jump from a year earlier; that comes despite overall home entertainment spending being little changed at about $10.1 billion, according to data compiled by Video Business magazine and Rentrak.
Blu-ray sell-through market share in France and the U.K. will more than double next year to as much as 6%, according to Mai Hoang, lead analyst in Futuresource’s home video team.

2 Comments

  1. If Sony wants BluRay to leap ahead, they might consider some sort of incentive for the hardware makers to produce CD/DVD/BluRay computer internal drives. I would buy one now, but with prices dropping precipitously, it seems wise to wait.
    If the drives and blanks could be subsidized in some way BluRay should develop much faster than now appears likely.

  2. What’s missing here? The word “record”. Who wants to spend even a low price on a Blu-ray player when they’ll have to replace it w/ a recorder sooner rather than later? Maybe if they had put a recorder and a TV tuner in a Laserdisc player, the format would have had a fighting chance.

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