Year-to-date Blu-ray vs. DVD Sales Data

 

If you’re as much of a statistics addict as I am, then Home Media Magazine and Nielson Videoscan have an early Christmas present for ua: a full year-to-date data on how Blu-ray sales are comparing to DVDs.  For those who don’t think Excel is actually an entertainment program, feel free to skip the rest of this post.

Keep in mind all this data is year-to-date through 11/16/08, so the all important Holiday shopping season beginning with Black Friday is NOT included in these numbers, but it does provide us with an interesting baseline to later see how much of an improvement Blu-ray makes in these last weeks of the year.  Also, all data shown is U.S. only.

Source: Nielson VideoScan via www.homemediamagazine.com

Normally, Home Media Magazine reports Blu-ray vs. DVD Sales using only the Top 20 titles for the week.  Since there are MANY more DVDs available than Blu-ray Discs, focusing on just the Top 20 titles artificially inflates the Blu-ray numbers by a few percentage points.

For the year-to-date data presented above, the pie chart shows total unit volume, so its a direct 1-to-1 comparison between number of titles sold on each format.  As such, the sales percentage for Blu-ray is quite a bit lower than normal, at only 4%.  The volume (in dollars) however, is notably better, with Blu-ray sales making up 6.1% of the total dollars spent.

Finally, and most strikingly, comparing this year with last, DVD is trending down 8.47%, while Blu-ray is up an amazing 233.23%.  Of course, the DVD market is mature, and on the decline, while Blu-ray is just emerging… but for anyone claiming Blu-ray is DOA, the numbers just don’t bare that out.

Source: Nielson VideoScan via www.homemediamagazine.com

The above charts are a bit confusing, so let me explain them up front: the left chart shows the top selling discs (ranked off of the #1 title, as to not reveal exact sales numbers), while the chart on the right shows the BD marketshare (vs. DVD) of those SAME 20 titles.  There are many higher ranked Blu-ray titles in terms of marketshare, but if they didn’t make the top 20 in total sales, they aren’t represented on the chart.

No major surprises in the top sales chart, although it must be painful for Universal, after finally joining the other studios in supporting Blu-ray, to not have a single title in the Top 20 for the year.  On the other hand, Paramount who defected from then returned to the Blu-ray camp currently holds the #1 and #3 spots.  This will be an interesting chart to look at again at the end of the year just to see how quickly and by how much The Dark Knight is able to slaughter all sales numbers to claim the top spot.

Although the marketshare chart is somewhat less useful as it isn’t a true top 20, it’s still interesting to see that among the top 20 titles on Blu-ray for the year, 9 of them did 20% or more of their sales on Blu-ray disc.  This is an excellent indicator, that at least among certain types of films, Blu-ray sales can make up a quite significant percentage of the sales.