Thanks to a new research report from Sony, industry watchers are getting their best look yet at hard high-def disc sales numbers from Nielsen VideoScan, including per-title sales figures for high-def discs released on both next-gen formats.

Focusing on sales data for the week ending March 18 (the same week that Sony's 'Casino Royale' smashed high-def records by shipping 100,00 units to retail), it should come as no surprise that the VideoScan numbers released by Sony are favorable to the studio, with five of its releases ranking among the top-selling next-gen discs that week.

The numbers that week were equally as impressive for Blu-ray, which outsold HD DVD by a ratio of 9:2, and dominated the list of top-selling next-gen discs -- the HD DVD edition of 'The Departed' was the only HD DVD disc to appear among the top ten best selling high-def discs.

But while abstract ratios and percentages like these have been bandied about for several months now, the Sony report goes one step further, providing the first public release of hard sales figures for HD DVD and Blu-ray discs from Nielsen VideoScan, the home entertainment industry's leading source for competitive sales data.

Among the numbers revealed: as of March 18, VideoScan put the cumulative number of Blu-ray titles sold since the format's inception at 844,000 units, versus HD DVD at 708,600.

But perhaps most interesting are the per-title sales numbers for the top ten selling discs across both formats, which are provided both in the form of a weekly tally (again for the week ending March 18), and as year-to-date totals.

While these charts confirm the previously reported strong showings for such A-list titles as 'The Departed' 'Batman Begins' and 'Superman Returns' (with each clocking per-format sales totals since-inception of at least 28,000 units sold), they also demonstrate a very steep drop-off for titles outside of that top rung, with even discs among the top-ten best sellers that week moving fewer than 1000 units apiece:

 

While we should note that the VideoScan numbers are not all-inclusive (for example, they don't include discs sold at Wal-Mart or some online merchants), the lower sales numbers at the bottom end of weekly list and on display elsewhere in the report (where some titles are listed as selling fewer than 200 units since inception) are certainly still a sobering reminder that both formats still have a long way to go in their shared quest to supplant standard-def DVD.

http://www.highdefdigest.com/news/show/564

So, in other words, if you add up the sales of all Blu-Ray and HD-DVD movies they have sold less than 1 pretty average movie.

and your point is what.....

the only thing that this shows is that Blu-ray and HD-DVD are not selling very well at the moment, however, although HD-DVD started well, since the PS3's releas BD is doing much better than HD-DVD.

 I would also like to say that in Europe these figures are hundreds of times lower and HD-DVD is hardly selling at all (the top HD-DVD is at number 492, compared to number 31 for blu-ray. It's  also true that there are absolutely no HD-DVDs in stores, but their are low numbers of BDs, but there are still some, ever since the PS3 launch.

 All this shows that the PS3 is the main thing that can win the format war.

I have seen lots of speculation on how well Blu-Ray movies have been selling and been called a "Retard" when I said that both formats were selling far below DVD standards.

Considering high def DVD is a new format, it IS selling quite well.  According to sales figures, Blu-ray in particular, but high def in general is taking off faster than standard def DVD did when it first came out.

point is that both HD formats  suck at the movement for sales vs DVD..

The same thing was said about UMD at about the same point in its life ...

I'm not saying that Blu-Ray/HD DVD are going to face the same fate as UMD but I suspect that both formats will see rapid growth to a point and then stall.

 Yes, but everyone knew that would be the case for some time.  The real question is, can Sony/Toshiba/others convince people like me that it's worth several times the money (plus an expensive player) for high-def movies compared to standard DVDs?  I think from the phrasing of that question you can decipher where my opinion lies, and I think most people are going to be with me.  After all, this is a nation that bought nearly 1 million GBAs this holiday season...

Ah, but there's a big difference between UMD and Hi definition formats.  UMD was just a crappy format.  It had fewer features, could only be viewed on a 3" screen, and ran your PSP's batteries down at lightning speed.  Blu-Ray has challenges, but I don't think you can compare UMD to Blu-Ray in terms of chances of success.

I brought up UMD because people tend to be overly optimistic by early performance of these types of formats.

The reason I was saying I anticipate that HD-Movie growth will stall is that less than half of houses have HDTVs currently and few people expect it to break that boundry until 2010/2011; at the same time there will be a large portion of the HDTV buying public who bought their TV because it was a flat-panel display. I expect that at some point (I'd say roughly 25% of the DVD marketshare) these formats will need people of modest income to replace their TV and buy a HD-Movie player in order to continue their growth; something that may happen but at a very slow pace.