One thing of importance to note is with the Amazon BOGO the 4 Harry Potter titles are leading spots 1 through 4 on HD DVD which has never been done before considering it's beating all other discs including DVD. The best title before was 300 on BD which went to #2. Congratulations Warner and HD DVD.

Interesting story. Owning a chain of 6 stores in the Dallas area (who rent and sell movies and hardware), these sales are definately not good for us, especially with Amazon bumping the BOGO sales every week now for one of the two formats. That really hurts the smaller chains trying to do business, but luckily many people still don't shop online and while our prices are very low, we cannot compete with what ends up 10.00 hd movies. When we started getting into HD, we went equally in July of this year with hd-dvd and blu-ray. At first we were selling an average of 2 to 1 in favor of blu-ray sales. But since then, we have been more at 4 to 1, even last week with Bourne as the big release. Our Harry Potter blu-rays went out of stock in 2 days, we still have some of the hd-dvd copies. We are going to re-evaluate our buying on the formats, as we do much better with blu-ray. I do have to wonder, why would Warner let loose the Harry Potter titles after 1 week of release for buy one free sales? This makes no sense to me unless the sales of the hd-dvd version were much less. If all were equal I think they would have worked with Amazon on the same for both formats. The fact that the titles hit the top 20 on hd-dvd on Amazon doesn't say much for profit for Amazon or Warner Brothers. The business-sense fact is that Warner made much more on the blu-ray version at regular or sale price, not at 10.00 give-away price. So it seems funny to me those touting the numbers on the charts, which matter not to Warner when they are losing money to make sales.

After a spectacular holiday season in which our stores sold over 3200 Playstations, 943 stand-alone Blu-ray players, 437 hd-dvd players and 91 hd-dvd xbox add-ons, I have to say I am excited about the season. Up to last Friday we have sold a total of 5339 blu ray discs and 1342 hd-dvd discs, and those are not numbers to complain about for newer formats. The Buy One Get One Free sales that have been going on are tough on the smaller retailers and smaller chains. We reduced some of the hd-dvd movies lower than normal because of lack of sales of software in the format, but we can't compete with one free. My concern is these news stories the likes of which I read in the trades like VB and HMR. They are saying so many hd-dvd players have been sold including a sell out of $98 players and "tons" since that November weekend, then I have to wonder why am I left with so many hd-dvd copies of hit titles? I have been reading these stories and purchased based on some of them, though not too heavily. Here I am left with way too many. It seems to me the attach rate is more, at least with my stores for the blu-ray discs. I figured hd-dvd, with its pricing might blow away blu this holiday season but we ended up with just the opposite. I am afraid the legs on hd-dvd are running out., The players certainly cannot get any cheaper, and with hits like Transformers, Shrek and Bourne, there should have been more action. What else can they do? Blu-ray hardware prices will be almost the same within 3-6 months, so will all of the extras and ethernet, so if we already have such an advantage for blu-ray, what will happen then, this in addition to all of the catalog titles coming from all the blu-exclusive studios. We always find content is king, period. All I know is this was a learning experience for us. We definately plan to shift our forces behind blu-ray because that is where the money is.