January 12, 2009 by Mark Isle
In a market where most products are understandably struggling to sell, Blu-Ray has been thriving. The video format that is being touted as the eventual successor to DVD, tripled its sales over the Christmas period as compared with last year. The figures were released at the CES, an event that’s proving to be good luck for Blu-Ray – Last year, just before it, Warner Bros withdrew their support for HD-DVD, all but killing the competing format off.
Last year, with Blu-Ray now the only High Def disk out there, the US market ended up buying 28.6 million in the 4th quarter alone. The best seller was The Dark Night which, incidentally, became the first Blu-Ray disk to sell over a million copies.
The fact that one title can account for such a relatively high percentage of the market begs the question how much is 28.6 million anyway, how far behind DVD does Blu-Ray remain. Well, of course Blu-Ray is miles behind its competitor – HD TV is still in its infancy and people have DVD collections that they’re not yet willing to replace.
However, the heartening thing for Blu Ray is that the adoption rate for the new technology is proving much higher than that of DVD. Now, 2.5 years after the launch of the format, there are 10.7 Blu-Ray players in the United States – A similar time after DVDs launched there were only 5.4 million DVD players.
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