Blu-ray & HD DVD Sales: Pitiful

In reviewing the news related to the high def format war last week, I was struck by the announcement from the Blu-Ray Disc Association (the BDA), that 4 million Blu-Ray discs have been sold in 2007 compared to 2.7 million on HD-DVD. This Blu-Ray release was released in response to one from the HD-DVD camp concerning the uptick in sales of HD-DVD players and that there have been 750,000 HD-DVD players sold in the US to date, including the X-Box 360 add on. As always, you must take the PR releases from all sides in the format war with a huge grain of salt.

However, there was one fact stated in this release which has gotten little notice, namely the quoted sales figures. Let’s for a moment accept them as true. While 4 million Blu-Ray discs sold is better than 2006, it means that all of the BD discs sold in 2007 don’t even total the sales figures for one major DVD release like Transformers or 300. That’s right, ONE DVD release in 2007, just one, has outsold the entire number of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD’s sold in 2007. How pitiful is that? It just shows how small the HDM market is these days and that the real threat to high def optical medium is not the war but DVD. Stop crowing about your sales figures guys. Neither amounts to a hill of beans. Sales figures will continue to be small until the price of the players goes under $100.00 and the price of discs under $20.

My second item is a pet peeve of mine and relates to the use of trailers on Blu-Ray and HD-DVD discs. One must sit there on some discs and toggle through what seems like an endless string of trailers for movies currently in theaters or soon to be in theaters or already released on HD or BD or soon to be released. The worst offender is Disney. My God, it almost takes 5 minutes to toggle ahead of these trailers to get to the menu. which, of course, can take another couple of minutes to come up.

A memo to the folks at Disney: drop the forced trailers. But them in the extras so we can look at them if we want to. Let us watch the movie we paid for first. Have the menu boot up first. Some studios do this with Paramount and Universal being two. The responsiveness of both format players can be slow enough. Why add to the misery, especially when we are only going to fast forward through them anyway?

Finally, am I the only one sick and tired of the misleading HD ads on TV from the cable companies? Yes you Comcast. They run an ad claiming that they have more HD “at any given moment” than any other provider, including DIRECTV. While that may be true, it is only true because of their HD VOD offerings, most of which could have been recorded off your DVR, or were already shown, or require a fee to be paid or are not very worthwhile at all. What is not true is that Comcast has more linear HD channels than DIRECTV, which would seem to be what most listeners or viewers would assume listening to these ads.

How about less misleading ads Comcast? Tell the viewers or listeners that you don’t have as many HD channels but a lot more HD VOD and crow about the quality of your picture vs. DIRECTV, Just don’t leave the impression that you have more HD channels as that is not true. Take a page from Verizon’s FiOS which now notes it is adding HD VOD and will add more HD channels in 2008. While I would prefer more HD channels now, at least they don’t try to claim that the HD VOD they are adding are the equal to Directv’s growing HD lineup.

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