14 DAY TRIAL // As we're reporting live from the battlefield of the Blu-ray vs. HD DVD war, news are rather...confusing, to say the least. Thus, if we are to believe the statements issued by the two sides, their favored next-gen DVD format is the winner. However, the truth of the matter is that each of the two sides has recorded some victories over the other, but only in specific sales areas, the overall picture of this whole "conflict" still being that of a stalemate.
But let's see what each of the two sides is boasting about. First of all, after claiming dominance over the Japanese recorders' market, the Blu-ray side has just announced that they've sold over 1 million discs in Europe, which means that over 73 percent of all HD movies ever sold were Blu-rays. Pretty impressive, no? However, we must not forget that all of these sales are mostly due to the PlayStation 3 gaming console (by the way, over 20 million Blu-ray discs containing games were also sold).
This announcement comes after a study carried out by Home Media Research revealed that Blu-ray Disc DVD titles had outsold rival HD-DVD by almost two-to-one in the first nine months of the year in the United States, which means that things look pretty gloomy for HD DVD. Or don't they?
Well, it seems that even if they don't sell too many discs, HD DVD backers sell a whole lot of players. Thus, the HD DVD camp claims that it has sold no less than 750,000 dedicated players in the US, with European sales picking up as well, mostly due to the aggressive low pricing policy.
It's still not quite clear who's dominating this market (meaning, there's no clear victor in this war), and it will be quite some time before one side is really able to claim, based on honest, openly-accepted figures that it's won the next-generation DVD race. Up until then we'll just have to settle for the usual media crap, more or less true figures, accusations and all sorts of more or less shadowy marketing tactics.