The ongoing HD DVD vs. Blu-ray has taken a short break (at least as far as the media is concerned) over the past few weeks, but it seems that this relatively short period of "peace" is over. And that's because the HD DVD camp has just received an important morale boost from two independent market research groups, which place the next-gen DVD format backed by Toshiba in front of its rival from Sony.

Thus, according to an article by Susanne Ault for Video Business, who is quoting Jodi Sally, Toshiba VP of marketing of digital A/V products, NPD Group unit sales figures point out to the fact that HD DVD players currently stand for 53% of sales, Blu-ray players for 44%, while dual format players come in last at around 3%.

Furthermore, Toshiba's marketing VP also talked about the future sales, as the company estimates that 5 million HD DVD drives for desktops and notebooks will be sold during fiscal 2008, especially due to the fact that HD DVD laptops are closing in on a relatively attractive $1,000 price point, likely fueling the retail movement.

The second set of figures comes from Netflix, and refers to the next-gen discs rentals, a special area often overlooked by other studies. Thus, as Marcus Yam from Daily Tech informs us, according to Netflix data gathered by Compete's online traffic metrics, HD DVD is the preferred high-def format for customers of the largest online rental firm in the U.S. Netflix users that deliberately set a particular format as preferred chose HD DVD by a factor of 2.4:1 when compared to Blu-ray Disc favorers.

The strangest thing about this whole situation is that the Blu-ray Disc section had 1.8 times more browsers of the selection than the HD DVD section. But of those consumers who looked at high-def discs, browsers of HD DVD were 4.4 times more likely to set it as their preferred format as compared to Blu-ray Disc. Furthermore, the HD DVD format saw greater growth numbers than Blu-ray Disc over the June to August period observed.

Do these two studies foresee a possible ending of the HD DVD vs. Blu-ray conflict? Not very likely, as the situation has changed so often over the past few months that it's actually difficult to predict what's going to happen next. Nevertheless, the fact that the PlayStation 3 still remains the main marketing vehicle behind the Blu-ray format might actually extend its level of popularity to some extent, at least taking into consideration the fact that everyone's expecting a serious price drop for Sony's gaming console.

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