Blu-ray vs. HD DVD: Nielson VideoScan Comparison for Week Ending 1/27/08

 

Every week Home Media Magazine reports the latest Nielson VideoScan numbers for the Blu-ray vs. HD DVD battle.  They include three figures: Weekly, Year-to-date, and Since Inception.  Weekly numbers examine discs sold at retail over the course of just the current week, the YTD numbers look at sales from the first week ending in 2008 to the present, and the since inception numbers show the relative performance of Blu-ray and HD DVD discs since the formats' respective births.

Nielson VideoScan Data for Week Ending 1/27/08

Source: Nielson VideoScan via http://www.homemediamagazine.com/

Weekly sales: Blu-ray leads HD DVD 82% to 18%, 100:22.0, or 4.56:1

YTD sales: Blu-ray leads HD DVD 77% to 23%, 100:29.9, or 3.35:1

Since Inception sales: Blu-ray leads HD DVD 64% to 36%, 100:56.3, or 1.78:1

For the third week in a row, Blu-ray slaughtered HD DVD by a more than 4:1 ratio.  The should get a "dead cat bounce" next week when the numbers come out for the several Buy 1 Get 1 Free sales stores held on HD DVD software last week.  But, as others have noted, the chart is starting to look like the Big Blu Pac-Man is eating one of the little red ghosts.  Still, barring a miracle, the "Little Format that Could(n't)" will be all but crushed by mid year.

Nielson VideoScan Top 10 for Week Ending 1/27/08

Source: Nielson VideoScan via http://www.homemediamagazine.com/

While the list above looks like a Blu-ray Top 10 list for last week, it's actually a Top 10 list of Blu-ray and HD DVD titles.  It just happens (again) that all of the top 10 titles were Blu-ray titles.  I'll continue the post these charts each week until either Home Media Magazine decides to stop posting or it just becomes too embarrassing for HD DVD to bother continuing.

While nearly everyone in the industry has been calling for Toshiba to throw in the towel, they seem content to continue pretending to fight... at least until the existing stock of players has sold out.  It had widely been reported that Toshiba was planning a Hail Mary play... with a major ad to be run during the Superbowl.  Well, "the ad that saved the format" never materialized.  Instead, select markets got a standard definition ad that had been run before during the affiliate break around halftime.  Most markets got nothing.  This could well be the last of the Toshiba marketing blunders in this format war, so its worth remembering for the sheer bravado required to alert the media that you were launching a massive new advertising campaign with a Superbowl advertisement, only to deliver neither a new campaign nor an actual Superbowl ad.