Quote Originally Posted by nightflier
Wooch,

Do you have any figures for Universal, by itself? It would be interesting to compare how many BR disks were sold as opposed to HD-DVD disks. Since the movies are all from the same catalog, it would seem to me that this would be the best indicator, since it would eliminate the consumer's movie title preference.

Another interesting detail that I just heard this weekend from a BB sales guy, is that the sales of both formats in his store are just about the same, even though 2/3 of the shelf space is for BR. I asked why the sales figures did not reflect the amount of shelf space, and he said that this is how they were being told to stack the shelf from management. (And yes, I also asked him if he owned either player and he said he hadn't made up his mind yet).
Unfortunately, none of the published data gives you actual sales figures by title (you have to subscribe to the Videoscan data in order to obtain that info). Three months ago, Sony issued a fairly comprehensive report that did detail the sales figures by title, but I've seen nothing that tallies the sales since that time.

http://www.thedigitalbits.com/files/...port031807.zip

I haven't checked into it recently, but I know that Home Media occasionally publishes the high def sales rankings and includes the ratio of sales between the different titles. While you can get some idea of the magnitude by which the top selling disc outsells the #2 or #10 discs, there's not enough data to calculate the actual unit sales.

As far as Universal goes, I know that they have been aggressively releasing HD-DVD catalog titles, but I'm not so sure how much of an impact it has had on sales. The biggest uptick that HD-DVD got in its market share occurred in April when Universal had some appealing new releases on tap such as Children of Men and did the necessary promotion to spur sales. At that time, HD-DVD's week-to-week market share increased to about 48%. Since then, their market share has settled into the low to mid-30% range, which is about where their YTD market share remains.

If you want an indicator on the impact of Universal's catalog releases, look at the week ending 7/1 (release date 6/26). That week, Blu-ray had two new releases that simultaneously came out on HD-DVD (no exclusives), while HD-DVD had a much larger release slate that included 11 catalog releases from Universal. This is how the market shifted that week (source: Videoscan) -

Week ending 6/24: Blu-ray 70%, HD-DVD 30%
Week ending 7/1: Blu-ray 65%, HD-DVD 35%

Not much of a shift despite a much bigger slate of releases on HD-DVD (the Videoscan data includes sales from Best Buy). To me, this indicates that HD-DVD cannot survive on Universal's determined effort to empty their vaults. This really relies on Universal generating a strong slate of new movies, and their box office performance the last couple of years does not look promising.