GamerNode: News - HD DVD sales rebound. It ain't dead yet...

HD DVD sales rebound. It ain't dead yet...

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]

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