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HD-DVD's ship is sinking fast

By Matthew Moskovciak, CNET.com
Jan 24, 2008


When Warner Bros. announced it was becoming a Blu-ray exclusive studio, most observers of the format war agreed that it was a mortal wound for HD-DVD. The only remaining question was, how long is HD-DVD going to last? Well, according to the latest NPD data (as compiled by Bill Hunt at The Digital Bits), not very long. During the week of January 5 to 12--the first week the market had to respond to the Warner announcement--Blu-ray absolutely trounced HD-DVD in hardware sales, grabbing 92.53 percent of the high-def disc player market. That's pretty ugly for the HD-DVD camp, but it only gets worse. The most damning aspect of these numbers is that they do not include the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 HD-DVD addon drive--only standalone players. We previously thought HD-DVD's only road to victory was by selling tons of cheap standalone HD-DVD players, so the fact that relatively expensive Blu-ray players are starting to sell makes it seem like this format war has been officially declared over--by the consumers.

Of course, Toshiba slashed prices on its US HD-DVD players just a few days after this data ended--and we're very interested to see what kind of impact that has on hardware sales. But it's going to be hard (if not impossible) to overcome Blu-ray's momentum. Blu-ray also continues to outsell HD-DVD in software sales, largely because of the PS3 user base.