HD-DVD failure didn’t help Blu-ray

In February, Toshiba’s HD-DVD was defeated by Blu-ray and its supporters. The same month however, Blu-ray player sales were down 40% from January. No sudden burst of people who finally took the plunge. Quite the opposite. NPD’s consumer research shared the same sentiments we were shown yesterday. The current Blu-ray equipment is too expensive and people are satisfied with their DVD players. In March sales were up 2% from February, which means they were still down 38% from January.

Blu-ray seems to be a hard sell. The average Joe doesn’t see the difference between High Definition and Standard Definition (SD) unless he’s up close. For example, after the launch of the PlayStation 3, a lot of people didn’t even notice how they had connected their system in SD. It meant they weren’t getting the HD picture, which was the main advantage of the system. And you can’t compare it to the VHS to DVD transformation. Going from tape to disc was a major step. This is just updating the picture a little. With an average distance to your 32″ TV, it would be tough to see the difference between HD and an upscaled DVD.

I regress, before I turn this into a rant.