A study by Media Control GfK shows consumers will start spending more on home entertainment between now and 2010. But the growth won’t be caused by DVD sales, nor by Blu-ray sales. It will be the games section that gets more crowded. Overall the revenue will grow 17% the next two years.

Although Blu-ray sales will definitely grow, the decline of DVD sales will negatively compensate the extra revenue. Blu-ray revenue will skyrocket from $1.5 billion this year, to $8 billion in 2010. And especially the higher price point of the medium will help to bring in extra cash. Meanwhile, DVD spending will decline from $32.2 billion in 2008 to $26.2 billion in 2010.

But the worldwide growth from $61 billion in 2007 to $78.2 billion in 2010, will be caused by game sales. Gfk president Amy Heller said the sales are “expected to grow to $67 billion in 2008 thanks to growth of new formats like the Wii.” This would mean a game revenue growth of 22% in 2008 and the GfK is expecting another 18% in 2009 and 12% in 2010.

When we brought the news last week about Blu-ray player sales being down 40%, we thought, well, disc sales might still be up. People are still buying more PlayStation 3’s, which don’t count as a Blu-ray player sale. But when we see numbers like these, an over 7% drop in Blu-ray disc sales, you have to question what’s going on.

As far as I know, the week before wasn’t anything special. No reason for the sales being higher that week. So at this point, with HD-DVD out of the race, your numbers shouldn’t be going down. They should be up.

I still stand by my point, Blu-ray has a long way to go. The benefit is too low for the average consumer to pay a premium for it. I think the only way for Blu-ray to take over, is waiting for the prices to drop to DVD level. At that point it would be like choosing between an old and a new model with the same price. If you are smart enough, you will take the new model.

It will be interesting to see how it develops. If it will take off. Because video-on-demand is also ready to become the number one movie provider.

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.