We had a feeling something was up with the results of the recent Harris Poll and it looks like we had good reason. No one is trying to say that the folks that conducted the poll had a Red agenda or anything, it is just like Adams research puts it when talking about consumer polls in general, "you can't trust the average survey respondent to correctly identify the high-tech devices in their homes." You can say that again. The funny thing is that the results of the poll even look screwy when compared to the HD DVD Promotion group's numbers which reported that even after a few months following the format war, only 1 million stand-alone HD DVD players were sold. This is nowhere near the 10 million that it would take to make up 9 percent of the 111 million US households the poll reports. And in case you care, analysts project -- you know, the ones actually based on retail sales instead of a consumer survey -- that 14.8 percent of US households will have some way to play a Blu-ray Disc by the end of 2009, which is almost double what it was at the end of 2008.

Just some more data for you HD fans to pore over, as The Harris Poll talked to a couple thousand people in April and came away with statistics it claims show interest in Blu-ray is still "lukewarm." We're a little less than convinced, especially after reading over the press release that uses HD DVD to refer both to the dead format and all high def media as a whole in the same sentence, while mentioning that its stats show sales of HD DVD players are up over their 2008 marks by the same amount that Blu-ray is (excluding the PS3). Once you've gotten over that shock, there's also interesting stats showing the number of people planning to switch to Blu-ray in the next year is down to 7%, from 9% last year. Grab the PDF at the read link for the full breakdown, but we're not sure you'll give the survey any more credence than we do (not much.)