Black Friday, with its array of super-special discount offers, huge sales, scuffling in front of the cash register, etc. has come and gone, and both retailers and the companies carrying out various marketing studies are just now drawing a line. And according to the latest reports, it seems that Blu-ray's ascending sales trend was quite visible over this period, as the Sony-backed format has accounted for around 72.6 percent of the entire number of HD discs sold.

Thus, as the "Hollywood Reporter" informs us, the Nielsen VideoScan First Alert sales data, which gathers information from Best Buy, Target and Circuit City (but, quite surprisingly, not from the giant Wal-Mart, which typically accounts for around 40% of the DVD sales market), reveals the fact that 72.6% of high-definition discs purchased by consumers were Blu-ray and just 27.4% were HD DVD. Furthermore, the "classical" DVDs have fared pretty well too, since the the number of DVD sold during this period has recorded a huge increase, namely around 175%, compared to the previous week.

One of the best-selling discs over this period was 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment's "Live Free or Die Hard," which has managed to generate first-week sales that were 20% ahead of projections, in addition to nearly 100,000 Blu-ray Disc copies, said Steve Feldstein, the division's senior vp corporate and marketing communications. "The entire category was up significantly over last year, with growth of 15% and more, in many cases on Black Friday alone," the official added.

The strangest thing is that the Blu-ray format seems to have been favored over the past period, despite the fact that Toshiba released a hurdle of very affordable HD DVD players via Wal-Mart and other retailers, the smallest discounted price being around 98 US dollars.

Does this mean that we can actually foresee a winner in the HD DVD vs. Blu-ray conflict? Well, that's a possibility, but the truth of the matter is that we're still far from a definite answer, especially since, after all, this could be just a mood swing among consumers. However, despite of this changing market trends, one thing's for sure: the PS3 (and especially its cheaper variant) did a hell of a good job as a Blu-ray promotion vehicle, and might, in the end, prove to be that "edge" required for wining this competition.

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