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.

Hollywood may have had a record in their home country with $9.6 billion during last year, but Germany is struggling and saw a 5.7% drop in ticket sales in 2007. Cinemaxx, one of the leading chains in Germany, saw a 34% decrease in profits compared to 2006.

“The film industry, including Cinemaxx, cannot be satisfied with the development of the market in 2007. Despite a high number of high-profile films, the number of admissions remained below expectations,” the company said in a statement.

It’s true, last year had some big titles and they paid off in the US. A factor in all this may be the delayed release dates in Europe. While the Hollywood studios are doing more and more simultaneous releases, some movies are still coming out when the DVD hits the US shelves. That’s when the German audience can chose between a click on the internet or a ride to the theater.