Euro Blu-ray movie sales reach 2.37m discs

The sky is falling!

"So Europeans own roughly 51,000 HD DVD players."

"Can HD DVD keep up?"

EU has about 300,000K people.

0.000167 of every EU person owns an HD DVD player!

Well, I better dump my stocks and shift right quick. If the rate jumps to a full 2 parts per 10 thousand I'll be sunk.

Has the author heard of statistical significance? Miscarriage rates are above that in most countries, but humans are not extinct yet.

I wonder what the unscaled marks are at the old journalism skool?

Why say it in Europe??

Why do website keep going on about the US studios that have become 'exclusive' to Blu-Ray, or even HD-DVD? Their exclusives will mostly apply only to US distribution as they generally do not have distribution rights to thoses movies in the rest of the world, so its down to the distibuters in all the other countries which format they wish to release the movies on. So a Blu-Ray exclusive in the US could be a HD-DVD exclusive in France, but still a Blu-ray exclusive in Germany (if the distibutor didnt have rights in both countries). So if you Americans wanted these Blu-ray exclusives on your HD-DVD player, you could import them. But I know thats a hassle so will unlikely do much.

The downfall of the cheaper format, which would provide almost identical performance to the more expensive format is being pushed by site like this that either miss-inform or exclude relevent information, causing people to second guess buying a cheaper format.

I know that if I were to buy a HD player, it would have been a HD-DVD, why, its damn cheaper, doesnt have this profile crap, so, if I wanted all the extras, I have them all, without having to check which profile it will play them on.

All studios should just support both formats, the production cost of the film itself far exceeds the production cost of a second format type. It appears to work just fine for the gaming industry, where, the production of another format costs a great deal more than that of the movie industry, so the gaming industries margins would be far less per format produced than with the movie industry.

The only reason that a company would go exclusive (or even exclude from both formats) to a format is if there were minimal sales, which there is on both formats, due to the minimal install base of players, due to their high cost. The other reason is if a company were to subsidise the production costs of the discs, reducing them to such a level that to use that to produce a film on that format will be basically zero cost, so no risk.

Giveaway

Surely 90% of those are given away with a PS3. 10 freebies just for the stats.

@Conor Turton

As AC says, kinda flicked through the story without really reading it didn't you?

Oh and as for "distorting the facts", ignoring PS3 sales altogether would be a bigger distortion. 2.25 Million BD's to 34,000 players would assume everyone has bought 66 BD's each. Granted, not every PS3 owner will buy movies, but it's one of those figures that cannot be completely ignored. Someone needs to poll PS3 owners to find out how many BD's they own on average.

Stores everywhere (even in the UK) are beginning to drop the sale of HD-DVD players, simply because they are not selling. It's not dead yet, but if it were a fly, it'd be lying on its back and spinning in circles, buzzing.

EU population

According to Eurostat the EU population was 456.4 million in 2003. So, the 300 million mentioned above is wrong by some way. Even if you only include those in the Euro zone it's more than 300 million.

Oops, forgot the new countries

Due to the addition of two new countries the EU population is now 490 million. Sorry Romania and Bulgaria!

Fanboy idiocy reigns supreme.

Whilst I agree with the sentiment that Bluray is clearly winning, I'm not sure why people keep suggesting HD-DVD players aren't selling.

They've been flying off the shelves since the £120 for the player + 7 free HD-DVD offer because it's a no risk purchase if when the format really is completely dead and gone. Let's at least tone down the Bluray fanboyism to be realistic shall we? Yes Bluray has won but also yes HD-DVD players are still selling rather well - the EP30/A30 has been the top selling hi-def player on sites like Amazon for weeks now still.

I'm not sure why people feel the need to be so utterly supportive of Bluray winning the war so quickly, a prolonged format war would've forced Bluray players under the £200 mark to compete, but it's unlikely they will drop them anytime soon now. It seems largely that people have put their fanboyist support above what actually benefits them as a consumer. What exactly have the likes of Toshiba/Sony done for you to deserve the opportunity to keep prices artificially high, partly on players but primarily on discs?

Bluray winning this quickly benefits no one but the companies and unless you work for those companies I'd ask why people feel the need to so blindly support them because whilst you're giving them everything they're screwing you financially and in some cases (i.e. unfinished Bluray spec leading to players becoming obsolete already) are screwing you there too.

If people put as much energy into getting companies to be more fair to consumers as they did to blindly following and worshipping their every move we'd probably all be a lot better off. I have to admit I'm a little concerned at how quickly people have forgotten the whole Sony rootkit fiasco too when blindly taking sides, not that MS is any better or anything.

It's all academic TBH.............

It really doesn't matter which format wins as neither will go the same distance as plain old dvd. Download on demand is the future, the only thing that blu-ray and hd-dvd disks will eventually be good for is backing up large amounts of data for pc users.

Still, if yer daft enough to pay the price to prop up either physical format for the benefit of the movie industry, then good luck to ya :-)

There is more people with AIDs in Europe than Blu-Ray.

That is the facts, so going by the Statistics Lamppost AIDs is therefore more popular than Blu-Ray!

To my eye the take up of Blu-Ray seems very slow and it will be interesting to see how many Blu-Ray disks of latest releases are selling compared to DVDs of the same movies.

I think the movie industry are pushing Blu-Ray as an attempt to combat downloaded movies myself. But then I am nuts anyway!

@Ian, Re:Fanboy idiocy reigns supreme

To be fair, i've seen plenty of HD DVD fanboyism too.

I think people wanted the war to end soon so they could buy without feeling as though they backed 'the loser'.

I happen to benefit from a BD player with my PS3, but i bought the unit primarily to play games, so if HD-DVD had won the format war i would have bought an HD-DVD player. That said, I do now use the PS3 often to play (rented) BD's and play SD upscaled.

At the end of the day, it's about the big corps skinning us for more money to buy the same stuff again. VHS-DVD anyone? Yeh, i did it too. Now they want the cash again for DVD-HDFORMATOFCHOICE

I for one do not want to go down the route of 'online' everything. It's not much more than a permanent rental agreement.