HD DVD Sales Tumble After Warners Defection

The first HD DVD sales figures since Warner Brothers jumped ship to Blu-ray are starting to trickle in, and the news is bleak: both HD DVD disc and player sales have plummeted since Warners' surprise pre-CES announcement.

Engadget HD has the numbers from Nielsen VideoScan, which details disc sales for both Blu-ray and HD DVD. The latest word, for the week ending January 15: Blu-ray snagged a whopping 85 percent of disc sales, compared to just 15 percent for HD DVD, with no HD DVD titles at all in the top-10 list. Now, the numbers represent only one week's sales, and as Engadget HD points out, HD DVD didn't happen to have any big titles coming out that week; still, given that the historical Blu-ray/HD DVD split has been more like 60 to 40 percent, that's a sharp drop.

Meanwhile, NPD Group (via High-Def Digest) has sales numbers on the hardware side: for the week ending January 12, Blu-ray players represented an overwhelming 92 percent of all HD decks sold, compared to less than 8 percent for HD DVD. Compare that to the previous week, when Blu-ray and HD DVD player sales chalked up a 50-50 split. Ouch. That said, Toshiba announced an HD DVD player fire sale on January 13, so we'll have to see if that kicks up next week's sales a notch.

Again, we're just talking one week of figures here, but the numbers pretty much speak for themselves. Looks like the format war may be drawing to a close, rapidly.

Related:
Nielsen VideoScan High-Def market share for week ending January 13th, 2008 [Engadget HD]
Blu-ray Commands 93 Percent of Weekly Hardware Sales Post-Warner Announcement [High-Def Digest]