Amazon sold about 100K Blu-ray players over holiday
PHYSICAL: Potter, Trek and Up big sellers, retailer says
By Danny King -- Video Business, 12/28/2009
DEC. 28 | PHYSICAL: Amazon.com sold about 100,000 Blu-ray Disc players during the holiday season—we think.
The world's largest Internet retailer said that, side-by-side, the players the company sold during the period would stretch more than 27 miles. Factoring in a typical 17-inch width of a Blu-ray player, that distance would equal about 100,600 devices.
Amazon said Warner Home Video's Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Paramount Home Entertainment's Star Trek and Disney/Pixar's Up were the best-selling DVDs for the five weeks ended Dec. 19, and the best-selling videogame title and hardware device of the holiday season were Activision Blizzard's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Nintendo's Wii Fit Plus and Balance Board, respectively.
Other big sellers included Amazon's Kindle electronic reading device and Research in Motion's BlackBerry Bold 9700 smartphone, Amazon said in a statement over the weekend.
Retailers including Amazon, Best Buy and Walmart have spurred sales of Blu-ray players largely by discounting them, NPD Group VP of industry analysis Steven Baker said in a Webinar earlier this month.
The average price of a Blu-ray player sold on Black Friday, or Nov. 27, fell to about $150 from about $225 for Black Friday 2008. Walmart dropped its lowest advertised price for a Magnavox Blu-ray player by about $50 from a year earlier to $78, Baker said.
The price cuts helped boost U.S. dollar volume of Blu-ray players sold on Black Friday by about 5% from a year earlier, as unit sales surged about 50%.
