Well I would disagree.. PS3 wasn't really the reason that Blu-ray won over HD DVD.. it was heavy payouts, connections and deals under the table. Consumer really didn't have a lot of choice.
Did Sony help to sell more units at that point in time than HD DVD..sure.. PS3 did play some roll because people were starving for games so they started buying some Blu-rays. However it's not exclusively because of PS3. It was much more BOGOs and giveaways by Sony then anything else because they could. After all they are a studio alone.
It is without a doubt in my mind that seeing these numbers we can definitely imagine HD DVD being much much more successful with consumers than Blu-ray is today if it had won. Most people were actually buying standalones and even though they were massively outnumbered they were still managing to push 50:50, 60:40 ratios in sales. That was telling us obviously that even with drastically smaller numbers the attachment ratio was off the charts.
Imagine how many people would've owned HD DVD players today when Blu-ray hasn't even surpassed HD DVD today in standalones. That's pretty sad to be honest.
In the end, some people can spin it but when numbers like these come out it becomes obvious that PR and FUD is still very present among BDA supporting companies.
I find it interesting that the numbers for Blu-ray have pretty much become stagnant around the 10% mark for the dollar sold margins by Neilson, which as we both know thanks to mark up differences between DVD and Blu-ray is actually misleading because the actual units sold hardly ever brakes 10% of the units sold market. It’s gotten so predictable that anybody outside of Home Media Magazine, a company which strongly supports Blu-ray, don't even track the sales figures anymore.
The format war was unnecessary. It never should have happened. Imagine if there had been a format war over DVD?
Hindsight doesn't do anyone any good though...
I'd be loathe to underestimate the PS3 in the Blu Ray game. Considering how shitty the machine was and still IS for games, I'd imagine that most of the hardcore gamers would have bought xbox instead of bothering with the Playstation. Much cheaper, Much better games, none of this installation shit... Yeah, if I didn't want BD, I'd have bought an Xbox first, hell I had to buy one eventually anyway because the PS3 didn't have half the games I wanted, and they had castrated versions of the games I did want, with all the good DLC going microsoft way.
So you have to expect that a lot of gamers who were just in it for games stayed far away from Sony, but a lot of people who are big gamers already have the HDTV and decent surround sound system, so they could USE the blu ray, why wouldn't they? Besides, the PS3 is still one of the best blu ray players around. It plays everything, in the latest profile, has a great firmware update system, plays Divx and a shitload of other PC file formats, can stream from your computer (I use that as much as I use it for BD), and now you can get hulu and netflix on it. Why the hell would you buy anything else?
It is hilarious watching the Blu-ray evangelists making excuses as their beloved format fall flat on it face.
We now have some loopy nutter on here who claims that Harris are "disgruntled HD DVD" fans.
Beyond parody!
I'm still LMAO as every month goes by and Blu-ray fails to gain any 'traction' whatsoever in the true mass-market.
(and it is especially amusing to see with every month that goes by a new alternative means of delivery comes in & chips away at even the small minority-share niche Blu-ray can look forward to)
Blu-ray was the really dumb choice (as later events have been showing only too clearly) and the one way to ensure that high def on disk got stuck as a high margin short-lived niche. To those that spread the word & worked for this I say well done guys! Thanks for all the fun.
Just before the end of the format war, Toshiba payed Paramount to go HD-DVD exclusive, specifically for the HD-DVD only production of Star Trek TOS HD-DVD. When that set was released it sold a total of 2000 copies. Yes, 2000. Total. Also, Toshiba was starting to set up a subsidy program for Chinese companies to make HD-DVD players (analysts thought they were nuts because they were already hemorrhaging cash at this point, and this would only undermine their own sales).
These are both cases of "bribes" or "under the table dealing" that many posters have made against Sony. And let's face it, Warner went BD *after* those horrible numbers on the very much anticipated Star Trek HD-DVD set.
Also of note...
Blu-ray adoption has been FASTER than DVD adoption at the same point in the format's life. That changed in January or February, but that's because of the recession hitting full force.
From the beginning of the year, Blu-ray has sold 10% to 15% of DVD every week. The average is now about 12% of DVD sales, not these deflated "8%" figures you're seeing. The trend has been upwards, as Blu-ray sales have increased during this year.
The cited report mentions none of these things.
I don't understand what people have against Blu-ray, and why they are so adamant about trying to knock it down (see above posts). It is the best Home Video format we have ever had, and it's quite spectacular.
The fact for this year is that even the trade (always guaranteed to be blowing hard for a little PR-boosting optimism) expect sales at less than 7%.
"Although Blu-ray sales were up, Screen Digest said the format “barely made a dent in the missing revenue”.
“We expect Blu-ray to account for 6.9 per cent of international video spending this year – assuming there is strong promotional activity [by the studios],” said Helen Davis Jayalath, senior analyst at Screen Digest."
Blu-ray's true growth rate has been tiny and have shrunk lately (it has not out-paced DVD even with the huge difference being launched with the PS3 has brought it and a host of movies aimed at the 'PS3 demographic).
No wonder the cheer-leaders for Blu-ray here stopped posting the Nielson numbers. Last week sales 'grew' to $16 million - up from under $8 million the week before. That's poor with a capital P.
Time is running out, fast.
For those of us who never believed it would be anything but a short-lived niche format it's ok, we'll probably jump on the next one too, it's no biggee if you have the $.
For those who fooled themselves (and worse, others) less fortunate that it would become 'the next DVD' and take a majority share of the retail movie market it must be a little sickening to watch it all going slowly turning to cr@p heading down the sh*tter.
Eating pie..do you have any idea how much Sony paid in order to keep the studios?
Fox and Warner were ready to leave Sony's camp prior to CES only because Sony paid $500 million to Warner Brothers and another $150 million to Fox as Fox was unsatisfied with replication and other manufacturing costs involved with Blu-ray. Not only that they paid them but the deal of the payments was to make announcements and other pricing structures to specifically hurt HD DVD as much as possible which was seen in the way they acted. They first announced the Blu switch while all HD DVD Group members were on the way to CES that year so it would catch them at the worst possible time and they would have no response. That's why Toshiba didn't respond to anything at CES. It was a real back stab. Secondly, they did the early Blu-ray release of movies instead of HD DVD even though they should've respected their agreements until March that year.
Winners write history of course but it was really a power play with cash and deals going down under the table. It was certainly not decided by consumers as we can see by these statistics. But I guess life is like that. I'm glad that we have at least one full HD format anyways. But to say that Sony didn't really pay anything is silly. The future of their company depended on Blu-ray winning so they would've paid anything. If HD DVD won that would've been not only the end of PS3 but they would have no way to recoup the money they spent on Blu so it was really something they wouldn't leave to chance no matter what it cost.
But this is not the only amount that Sony spent. They've spent through the nose just to get Fox to stick with them to begin with then split the hundreds of millions of dollars with Panasonic to help Disney stay on track with Blu. Officially Panasonic was paying for Disney's tours but Sony took a hit as well on the final balance sheet. Not to mention the MGM purchase that was also another investment you can attribute to Blu-ray because they wanted to secure their library to be exclusive to Blu-ray. The whopping amount to get part of MGM was huge in the overall scheme of things.
Sony was already known to do things like this before as well. They took a similar approach a few years ago to gain exclusivity for its Super Audio CD format. Abkco Records reportedly received a large sum from Sony to re-release the early Rolling Stones catalog in that format. Consumers decided they were happier with iPods and that was it. It wasn't a power play such as we had with format war.
Toshiba's Paramount payoff was nothing but a response to an already existing payoff game Sony has started.
Sony lost over $3 billion dollars alone in payoffs and other expenses just to try to get Blu-ray to win and whether consumers love it or hate it they succeeded. As we can see obviously the format who was not favored by consumers won and unfortunately those of us who do want to get great HD quality are now, still, carrying the sloppy format 3 years into it's existence.
The joke of it all is that in many instances Blu-ray on-line prices are at or around DVD levels.
Still sales do not take off and obviously the higher margin that was expected has vanished before things even get going, leaving only the early adopter & the PS3 gang to get screwed - so much for your 'loyalty' eh boys?
The fact that the prospect of there being any money in it is vanishing fast is what gives us all the final guarantee that Blu-ray won't be around for too long.
BTW Bozster I know you gave some of the losses Sony flushed away on PS3 there (never to be recouped, even if they do - eventually - start to make money on the PS3 sales price v production costs) but did anyone ever unearth the figure for the vast amount of R&D spent on this white elephant? I'd be interested to know just what Sony (and the rest) have flushed down the lav on this one. How many $ billions?
"I don't understand what people have against Blu-ray"
From day 1 the BDA been little more than a bunch of lying liars lying to us about it all. I suspect that has a lot to do with it.
Sony's arrogance in all of this has been incredible and bound to trun off a lot of people.
Plus the fact that it's primarily a Sony product and in view of Sony's criminal (think root kit, any proibvate person would have been jailed for that stunt) past and their well-known tack-record for proprietary and trouble-some products (that don't like to play nice with anything but a Sony product) it just means a hell of a lot of people wouldn't touch them or their stuff with a barge-pole.
But tbh it's all immaterial now, the damage is done & quite frankly Blu-ray (compared to the original hopes for it) is f*cked.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Bozster @ Jun 22nd 2009 12:10PM
Well I would disagree.. PS3 wasn't really the reason that Blu-ray won over HD DVD.. it was heavy payouts, connections and deals under the table. Consumer really didn't have a lot of choice.
Did Sony help to sell more units at that point in time than HD DVD..sure.. PS3 did play some roll because people were starving for games so they started buying some Blu-rays. However it's not exclusively because of PS3. It was much more BOGOs and giveaways by Sony then anything else because they could. After all they are a studio alone.
It is without a doubt in my mind that seeing these numbers we can definitely imagine HD DVD being much much more successful with consumers than Blu-ray is today if it had won. Most people were actually buying standalones and even though they were massively outnumbered they were still managing to push 50:50, 60:40 ratios in sales. That was telling us obviously that even with drastically smaller numbers the attachment ratio was off the charts.
Imagine how many people would've owned HD DVD players today when Blu-ray hasn't even surpassed HD DVD today in standalones. That's pretty sad to be honest.
In the end, some people can spin it but when numbers like these come out it becomes obvious that PR and FUD is still very present among BDA supporting companies.
3dpenguin @ Jun 22nd 2009 12:33PM
I find it interesting that the numbers for Blu-ray have pretty much become stagnant around the 10% mark for the dollar sold margins by Neilson, which as we both know thanks to mark up differences between DVD and Blu-ray is actually misleading because the actual units sold hardly ever brakes 10% of the units sold market. It’s gotten so predictable that anybody outside of Home Media Magazine, a company which strongly supports Blu-ray, don't even track the sales figures anymore.
Nick @ Jun 22nd 2009 2:19PM
The format war was unnecessary. It never should have happened. Imagine if there had been a format war over DVD?
Hindsight doesn't do anyone any good though...
I'd be loathe to underestimate the PS3 in the Blu Ray game. Considering how shitty the machine was and still IS for games, I'd imagine that most of the hardcore gamers would have bought xbox instead of bothering with the Playstation. Much cheaper, Much better games, none of this installation shit... Yeah, if I didn't want BD, I'd have bought an Xbox first, hell I had to buy one eventually anyway because the PS3 didn't have half the games I wanted, and they had castrated versions of the games I did want, with all the good DLC going microsoft way.
So you have to expect that a lot of gamers who were just in it for games stayed far away from Sony, but a lot of people who are big gamers already have the HDTV and decent surround sound system, so they could USE the blu ray, why wouldn't they? Besides, the PS3 is still one of the best blu ray players around. It plays everything, in the latest profile, has a great firmware update system, plays Divx and a shitload of other PC file formats, can stream from your computer (I use that as much as I use it for BD), and now you can get hulu and netflix on it. Why the hell would you buy anything else?
Multi-format-mayhem @ Jun 22nd 2009 3:49PM
It is hilarious watching the Blu-ray evangelists making excuses as their beloved format fall flat on it face.
We now have some loopy nutter on here who claims that Harris are "disgruntled HD DVD" fans.
Beyond parody!
I'm still LMAO as every month goes by and Blu-ray fails to gain any 'traction' whatsoever in the true mass-market.
(and it is especially amusing to see with every month that goes by a new alternative means of delivery comes in & chips away at even the small minority-share niche Blu-ray can look forward to)
Blu-ray was the really dumb choice (as later events have been showing only too clearly) and the one way to ensure that high def on disk got stuck as a high margin short-lived niche.
To those that spread the word & worked for this I say well done guys!
Thanks for all the fun.
Multi-format-mayhem @ Jun 22nd 2009 3:54PM
It's already too late.
Blu-ray took less than 4.5% of total disc sales last year and this year the trade expect it to take less than 7%.
With growth rates like that it's already over.
Far too little far too late.
EatingPie @ Jun 22nd 2009 7:38PM
This misinformation needs correction.
Just before the end of the format war, Toshiba payed Paramount to go HD-DVD exclusive, specifically for the HD-DVD only production of Star Trek TOS HD-DVD. When that set was released it sold a total of 2000 copies. Yes, 2000. Total. Also, Toshiba was starting to set up a subsidy program for Chinese companies to make HD-DVD players (analysts thought they were nuts because they were already hemorrhaging cash at this point, and this would only undermine their own sales).
These are both cases of "bribes" or "under the table dealing" that many posters have made against Sony. And let's face it, Warner went BD *after* those horrible numbers on the very much anticipated Star Trek HD-DVD set.
Also of note...
Blu-ray adoption has been FASTER than DVD adoption at the same point in the format's life. That changed in January or February, but that's because of the recession hitting full force.
From the beginning of the year, Blu-ray has sold 10% to 15% of DVD every week. The average is now about 12% of DVD sales, not these deflated "8%" figures you're seeing. The trend has been upwards, as Blu-ray sales have increased during this year.
The cited report mentions none of these things.
I don't understand what people have against Blu-ray, and why they are so adamant about trying to knock it down (see above posts). It is the best Home Video format we have ever had, and it's quite spectacular.
-Pie
Multi-format-mayhem @ Jun 22nd 2009 9:20PM
Eating Pie -
those sales % numbers you're quoting are just the usual cherry-picked garbage.
The facts are (as even this site had to post) that in 2008 Blu-ray took 4.45% of the total movie disk sales.
"Blu-ray software shipments grew .... to 63.2 million units in 2008, from 18 million units in 2007, DEG said.
DVD shipments also were down during the year, declining to 1.4 billion units, an almost 15% drop from 2007 unit shipments."
www.videobusiness.com/article/CA6627437.html?nid=3511
The fact for this year is that even the trade (always guaranteed to be blowing hard for a little PR-boosting optimism) expect sales at less than 7%.
"Although Blu-ray sales were up, Screen Digest said the format “barely made a dent in the missing revenue”.
“We expect Blu-ray to account for 6.9 per cent of international video spending this year – assuming there is strong promotional activity [by the studios],” said Helen Davis Jayalath, senior analyst at Screen Digest."
www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8768baf0-59d5-11de-b687-00144feabdc0.html
Blu-ray's true growth rate has been tiny and have shrunk lately (it has not out-paced DVD even with the huge difference being launched with the PS3 has brought it and a host of movies aimed at the 'PS3 demographic).
No wonder the cheer-leaders for Blu-ray here stopped posting the Nielson numbers.
Last week sales 'grew' to $16 million - up from under $8 million the week before.
That's poor with a capital P.
Time is running out, fast.
For those of us who never believed it would be anything but a short-lived niche format it's ok, we'll probably jump on the next one too, it's no biggee if you have the $.
For those who fooled themselves (and worse, others) less fortunate that it would become 'the next DVD' and take a majority share of the retail movie market it must be a little sickening to watch it all going slowly turning to cr@p heading down the sh*tter.
Bozster @ Jun 23rd 2009 1:34AM
Eating pie..do you have any idea how much Sony paid in order to keep the studios?
Fox and Warner were ready to leave Sony's camp prior to CES only because Sony paid $500 million to Warner Brothers and another $150 million to Fox as Fox was unsatisfied with replication and other manufacturing costs involved with Blu-ray. Not only that they paid them but the deal of the payments was to make announcements and other pricing structures to specifically hurt HD DVD as much as possible which was seen in the way they acted. They first announced the Blu switch while all HD DVD Group members were on the way to CES that year so it would catch them at the worst possible time and they would have no response. That's why Toshiba didn't respond to anything at CES. It was a real back stab. Secondly, they did the early Blu-ray release of movies instead of HD DVD even though they should've respected their agreements until March that year.
Winners write history of course but it was really a power play with cash and deals going down under the table. It was certainly not decided by consumers as we can see by these statistics. But I guess life is like that. I'm glad that we have at least one full HD format anyways. But to say that Sony didn't really pay anything is silly. The future of their company depended on Blu-ray winning so they would've paid anything. If HD DVD won that would've been not only the end of PS3 but they would have no way to recoup the money they spent on Blu so it was really something they wouldn't leave to chance no matter what it cost.
http://formatwarcentral.com/2008/01/04/warner-swayed-by-500-million-from-the-bda/
But this is not the only amount that Sony spent. They've spent through the nose just to get Fox to stick with them to begin with then split the hundreds of millions of dollars with Panasonic to help Disney stay on track with Blu. Officially Panasonic was paying for Disney's tours but Sony took a hit as well on the final balance sheet. Not to mention the MGM purchase that was also another investment you can attribute to Blu-ray because they wanted to secure their library to be exclusive to Blu-ray. The whopping amount to get part of MGM was huge in the overall scheme of things.
Sony was already known to do things like this before as well. They took a similar approach a few years ago to gain exclusivity for its Super Audio CD format. Abkco Records reportedly received a large sum from Sony to re-release the early Rolling Stones catalog in that format. Consumers decided they were happier with iPods and that was it. It wasn't a power play such as we had with format war.
Toshiba's Paramount payoff was nothing but a response to an already existing payoff game Sony has started.
Sony lost over $3 billion dollars alone in payoffs and other expenses just to try to get Blu-ray to win and whether consumers love it or hate it they succeeded. As we can see obviously the format who was not favored by consumers won and unfortunately those of us who do want to get great HD quality are now, still, carrying the sloppy format 3 years into it's existence.
Multi-format-mayhem @ Jun 23rd 2009 8:06AM
The joke of it all is that in many instances Blu-ray on-line prices are at or around DVD levels.
Still sales do not take off and obviously the higher margin that was expected has vanished before things even get going, leaving only the early adopter & the PS3 gang to get screwed - so much for your 'loyalty' eh boys?
The fact that the prospect of there being any money in it is vanishing fast is what gives us all the final guarantee that Blu-ray won't be around for too long.
BTW Bozster
I know you gave some of the losses Sony flushed away on PS3 there
(never to be recouped, even if they do - eventually - start to make money on the PS3 sales price v production costs)
but did anyone ever unearth the figure for the vast amount of R&D spent on this white elephant?
I'd be interested to know just what Sony (and the rest) have flushed down the lav on this one.
How many $ billions?
Multi-format-mayhem @ Jun 23rd 2009 8:18AM
Highest RankedEatingPie
"I don't understand what people have against Blu-ray"
From day 1 the BDA been little more than a bunch of lying liars lying to us about it all.
I suspect that has a lot to do with it.
Sony's arrogance in all of this has been incredible and bound to trun off a lot of people.
Plus the fact that it's primarily a Sony product and in view of Sony's criminal (think root kit, any proibvate person would have been jailed for that stunt) past and their well-known tack-record for proprietary and trouble-some products (that don't like to play nice with anything but a Sony product) it just means a hell of a lot of people wouldn't touch them or their stuff with a barge-pole.
But tbh it's all immaterial now, the damage is done & quite frankly Blu-ray (compared to the original hopes for it) is f*cked.