OPINION: Blu blues
By Paul Sweeting -- Video Business, 5/2/2008
MAY 2 | Blu-ray won the format war but it appears to be losing the peace.
Paul Sweeting is editor of Content Agenda
According to the latest numbers from the NPD Group, sales of set-top Blu-ray players (not PlayStation 3 consoles) dropped 40% from January to February before ticking up a scant 2% in March.
Since the rival HD DVD format died on Feb. 19, the hoped-for consumer rush to Blu-ray has yet to materialize.
As the baseball sage Yogi Berra once noted, if people don’t want to come to the ballpark you can’t stop them.
The situation may not be quite as clear as Yogi would have it, however.
To begin with, the first quarter is never a good season for sales of expensive electronics devices; inferring a trend in consumer demand from the first-quarter results is generally a bad idea.
Blu-ray hardware makers also did their best to squelch whatever demand might have been there by raising prices on their players: The average price of a Blu-ray player is nearly $100 higher today than during the fourth quarter, when the format faced competition.
Supplies also appear to have been constrained, leaving shelves bare at retail.
Read the full column on ContentAgenda.com.
