The Blu-ray disc, the high-definition successor to the digital video disc, was one of the few products that did well in the holiday shopping season, with sales tripling from 2007.
The figures were released this month at the International Consumer Electronics Show, scene last year of Blu-ray's decisive victory over rival format HD-DVD. "It turned out to be a phenomenal year for Blu-ray," said Tom Adams, of Adams Media Research.
Just before the 2008 show opened, Warner Bros. withdrew its support for HD-DVD, giving Blu-ray a strong level of support from Hollywood studios. A few months later, Toshiba, creator of the HD-DVD, said it would stop making players for the discs.
That left Blu-ray as the lone high-definition disc standard. U.S. consumers bought 28.6 million of them in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to The Digital Entertainment Group, a consortium of movie studios and electronics manufacturers. That's up from 9.5 million in the previous year. The biggest seller: "The Dark Knight," which was also the first Blu-ray disc to sell more than 1 million copies, said Andy Parsons, president of the Blu-ray Disc Association.
By Parsons' count, Blu-ray is showing a faster adoption rate than that of the DVD, the compact disc, high-definition television sets and several other common household technologies. At the end of 2008, 2½ years after they first became available, there were 10.7 million Blu-ray-capable players in the United States, according to the research firm DisplaySearch. Three years after the DVD launched in the 1990s, there were 5.4 million DVD players.
But the 10.7 million Blu-ray players includes more than 6 million Sony PlayStation 3 game consoles, bought mainly for gaming. With those taken out of the comparison, sales of stand-alone Blu-ray players are similar to those of DVD players at the same point.
At the electronics show this year, Blu-ray support was strong, with manufacturers announcing 18 new players. Sharp unveiled the first high-definition TV set with a built-in Blu-ray player. Panasonic announced the first portable Blu-ray player.
It's also clear that the players are maturing. Eleven of the new players have the BD-Live feature, which connects them to the Internet for interactive extras like games, downloadable trailers and chats with film makers.
About 40 million households have high-definition TV sets, so Blu-ray sales have room to grow. They're also still tiny compared to DVD sales. Americans spent $750 million on Blu-ray discs last year and $21.6 billion on DVDs.
http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20090118/BUSINESS/901180404
