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.

After a surprising box office success, ‘Juno’ is generating some heat in the DVD stores too. Getting in at the top spot, it beat last week’s ‘Alvin and the Chipmunks’ in the sales department. Alvin slipped to number three, with ‘Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem’ coming in second.

But the pregnant girl didn’t stop there. ‘There will be Blood,’ which came in first last week, lost its top stop to ‘Juno’ too. ‘There will be Blood’ went on to make more in rentals than it did at the box office. It made the third place with $15.6 million in rentals in two weeks, followed by ‘Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem’ with $7.7 million. ‘Juno’ managed to top that, with just $8.4 million.

The Screen Actors Guild and Hollywood studios aren’t ready to give up their pre-strike talk. The studios were going to talk to the AFTRA (TV and radio) next week, but the SAG has asked for a one week extension.

“We owe it to our entire industry to give the current . . . talks every opportunity to result in an agreement,” they reasoned. The two parties seem to have a better understanding than the WGA and the studios had last year. But there is still a lot to talk about. For example, the actors want double the amount of money for DVD and media sales. And a strike could potentially be way more costly than the writers’ strike from last winter.