Despite retailers and major movie companies dropping their support for HD DVD, HD DVD hardware sales stabilized and maintained a firm grip of 33% of all high-definition unit sales for the week that ended on January 19th. This is a huge jump back into sales from a week earlier, when Blu-ray commanded 90% of the market.
The NPD Group attributes the rise of HD DVD sales to the recent price cuts Toshiba made to its HD DVD players, which range anywhere from $100 to $200 off. For the week ending on January 19th, Blu-ray had 63% of all high-definition unit sales.
NPD analyst Ross Rubin offered comments that consumers are very sensitive to pricing when it comes to picking up a high-definition unit DVD player. Also standard-definition DVD players continue to utterly dominate DVD player sales and that impacts high-definition DVD sales too.
"Both camps face really strong competition from standard DVD up-converting models, which inexpensively render [consumers’] massive DVD libraries well on their TVs. We’ve seen a consistent trend of the market responding to changes in price and promotion by both camps. So you’ll see a significant shift [in sales one way or the other] in response to the end of a promotion or the beginning of a new promotion."
In related news, National Geographic announced plans to drop HD DVD support in favor of Blu-ray. Though National Geographic only released one format-neutral DVD so far, all future releases will only be for Blu-ray.
[Via Video Business]
