I found myself silently laughing as I read the statistics on the number of HD DVD and Blu Ray players sold this year. At first glance, they appear to be fairly strong at almost
695,000 units sold. But you need to look deeper at these numbers to really understand what is going on.
Of the 695k sold, about 425k were Blu-ray and about 270k where HD DVD. Seems like Blu-ray may be the obvious winner to the format war with numbers like these. Not so fast. Of the 425k Blu-ray players out there, only about 25k are stand alone players. The rest are Playstation 3s. On the other hand, about 120k of the 270k HD DVD players are stand alone. The other 150k are xBox HD DVD add on drives.
HD DVD appears to be outselling Blu-ray by 5:1 ratio. If I wanted a specific format to win over another, I would want HD DVD simply because it's DRM and fair use restrictions are the lesser of two evils. But I wouldn't care if either of them died a horrible death. Some of you may argue that these numbers are well higher than the 1997 sales numbers of the DVD player (around 300k). And you would be right, the number are higher in total. But no matter how bad Microsoft and Sony WANT their gaming consoles to be the "center" of our entertainment systems, it aint happenin'. Maybe for the college kid who got the Playstation 3 as a Christmas gift will use it that way. Maybe Billy's xBox 360 connected to the 19" RCA is capable of playing HD DVDs. Possibly the 25 year old bachelor will have this setup. But for those of us who purchase high end AV equipment, I'm sorry, but a gaming console is NEVER going to be the center of our home theater/home entertainment systems. Even though these systems are capable of playing an HD movie, is this the reason people are buying it? I think not.
The real reasons people are not buying either format is mostly cost driven. No one wants to spend $500 to $1000 on the next gen player. No one wants to spend $100s for the new cabling required to playback HD content. No one wants to spend thousands on a new HD TV. And no one wants to spend $30 on the new software (movies). In addition to that, I think people are really starting to understand what DRM is and what it means. Just look at what’s going on with the
downloaded music industry. If the record execs are catching on, we can hope that the movie execs will figure it out as well.
I’ll say it again. DRM is not about stopping piracy and it never has been. It’s about locking consumers into your products. It’s about locking out the competition. It’s about making money selling the same product over and over again to the same people. Well, I think consumers are catching on and they don’t like what they see. They don’t like paying for the same item again and again. They don’t like the fact that they can’t put iTunes downloaded songs on other devices. I think they are just tired of it. Listen up movie execs, the same is going to happen (is happening) to you.