Although I'm a little skeptical of these figures until NPD backs them up with more official sell-through numbers, Warners Brothers has issued a press release stating that the just released title "300" sold a combined 250,000 copies on Blu-ray and HD DVD discs in its first week of release.
Warner Brothers has previously released statements saying that "The Departed" was the first title to sell 100,000 copies combined on both formats, and that "Planet Earth" was the highest-grossing title on both formats.
250,000 copies is more copies than any high-def title has sold to date, and if "300" actually managed to sell that many copies to consumers in just its first week of release, it is definitely a huge milestone for high definition media.
There are many factors which cause me to question the validity of the claim, not the least of which is that the announcement was made before any of the major tracking services could have likely provided final data for the week. Moreover, it's hard to imagine stores all purchasing that many copies of a title when no other title has EVER sold anywhere near that many copies. Even if the 250,000 figure is truly "sold to retailers" or "shipped to retailers," however, this is still a major sales milestone.
The really interesting data will come at the end of this week, however, when Nielson releases their sales data and the Blu-ray to HD DVD ratio of this title. If the sales are really as high as claimed, this one title could really move the year-to-date and since inception sales ratios for the two formats. Given the much larger installed base of Blu-ray players than HD DVD players, it seems likely that the Blu-ray version will vastly outsell the HD DVD version, although the HD DVD version also has a regular DVD layer so people who don't know that HD DVD is actually a separate format can buy the disc and never know that they aren't getting the "HD" version of the film. It's gearing up to be an interesting week.
UPDATE: According to USA today, the sales ratio between Blu-ray and HD DVD is currently 65/35 for this title, so the Blu-ray version has sold roughly twice what the HD DVD version has.
0 comments:
Post a Comment