Not quite ...

The holiday season in 1999 was when DVD players started selling in a range where people were willing to pay for them; and the holiday season in 2000 was when the PS2 and the Apex Digital $99 DVD player were released which pushed DVD player sales to a new level.

Standalone DVD players were still well up there in price through the '99 holiday season, though. I did not buy my first standalone player until Spring '00 (I had previously watched DVDs on my PowerBook G3) when Sears had a decent enough Samsung player at half-price for a midnight madness sale, and it was still $200. This was after the PS2 debuted in Japan, and the format was going into year four.

I bought an RCA DVD player for a buddy as a wedding gift in Sep 2001, and that one was $249, too.

It actually is a pretty smooth rise of ~4 million more players sold per year for the 5 years after the first year.  That's a linear change in the rate, maintaining a fairly consistent growth pattern until it hit saturation, at which point it sold at a relatively constant rate. 

PS2 isn't included in these numbers, but considering it's first 3 years were a total of 21M, which occured during much of this growth, it was a fairly nonexistent blip.  It probably didn't have much actual impact on standalone adoption

Personally I have always stated that the PS3 is the main reason why Blu-Ray is outperforming DVD (which was hailed as the fastest adopted consumer tech!!). As you know movie sales outperform DVD as well, so it's a big factor and I think it will become an even bigger factor in the future. More PS3 owners will buy better HDTV, a slimline PS3 is likely to hit the market, etc.

Athough I agree, I disagree with your conclusions.

That's strange, cause I really don't make any conclusions, aside that you can't really say anything about the state of BD based on a graph that includes the PS3, without knowing how many PS3 users use it as a BD player. 

It's a reccesion not a deppresion. And how many of those people who have lost their jobs could have afforded Big HDTV's and playstation 3's in the first place? Blu-ray and HD tv's have only recently come out and the high prices result in low sales as with all new formats. As the prices come down, sales will go up and gradually the new format will slowly take over. For new formats their sales are doing very well all things considered.

I can't be sure, but I am think that the bulk of a movies lifetime sales come within the first few weeks. In Canada, Blu-rays are initially $29 at release while their DVD counter parts are typically $19.

But of course as you said, there are always sales. I actually bought Sweeny Todd on Blu-Ray at Wal-Mart last week for $9.97 and Space Odyssey for $16.97 (as well as a handful of others).

I'm not trying to say that blu-ray sales are sky-rocketing by any means, just that it is performing considerably better than your 'worst case scenario' assumption.

The bulk of a single title's sales will probably be in the first few months, yes; a large part of DVD sales as a whole come from the bargain bin.  You know, those $5 movies, the $10 triple-features, all those kind of things.  The sales may not be much for an individual title, but there are a lot of those titles.

You're right. I read over the single/whole discussion earlier. My mistake.

The sales model of digital movies in 2008 is incomparable to, for instance, VHS slowly breaking into U.S. homes.

These sales numbers will always be worthless when they count Playstation 3's, as well. All those other things, people built to USE with a specific purpose. Playstation 3's movie-playing ability is its secondary purpose, and there's no way to calculate how many of them are being used for BLUE