CES 2009: Blu-Ray US adoption rate vs CD/DVD/VHS/TV/Color TV/HDTV

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Dryden said:

tuoyo said:

I don't know how long DVD was out before PS2 was released.  From this graph I can safely assume PS2 was not out by then.  However, BD supporters will either never make a comparison for a time frame which caught the release of PS2 (e.g comparing DVD sales after 5 years with BD sales after 5 years) or they will do the comparison but include PS3 sales and exclude PS2 sales. 

I don't see how someone can use this graph to argue that BD is doing better than DVD at the same stage of their respective lives when PS3 has been out for most of that period and PS2 was not out at all.

You are correct. Though DVDs debuted in late 1997, stand alone players remained a premium product until around the time The Matrix DVD (DVD's tipping point, IMHO) hit the shelves in late 1999/early 2000. When the PlayStation 2 went on sale in Japan (March 2000), at a price of $399 it was half as much as the average standalone DVD player (~$800). Sony estimated then that over 3M Japanese bought a PS2 solely because it was the cheapest DVD player on the market, and it was further dropped to $299 only six months later in Japan to align its price with the North American launch in October.

Stand alone DVD players plummeted in price in America after the PS2's Japan launch, to sub-$200 levels, during that summer of 2000. Before the PS2, DVDs were almost exclusively a luxury item for business travellers who watched movies on their laptop computers. Three years after the PS2, DVD rentals officially surpassed VHS rentals.

That said, the problem with your argument that it's an unfair comparison is that there isn't a practical way to rectify the timeline and make it fair. What happened, happened. We have to go by the numbers given, and those number indicate that BD is being adopted faster than DVD was because of the PS3, and thanks to that, at this point in their respective lifetimes BD players cost a quarter of what DVD players did in year three. It will be interesting to see where this goes by year six or seven, though. It isn't logical that BD can continue at a growth rate that outpaces HDTV adoption.

 

 

Hard numbers to corroborate your argument: monthly standalone US DVD player sales throughout its lifespan:

http://www.thedigitalbits.com/articles/cemadvdsales.html

Interesting tidbit: there are about as many standalone DVD players in the US as PS2s in the world