As with JB Hi Fi, one of the leading DVD retailers in Australia, Target, the second largest retailer in the US, has announced it will now only stock Blu-ray players in its physical stores. This follows the announcement in June by Blockbuster, the largest video rental chain in the US, that it would only stock Blu-ray titles. In response, the HD-DVD camp released a statement claiming “what’s important is that stand alone HD-DVD players are still much more affordable than Blu-ray players”. While Sony and its Blu-ray camp have formed strategic alliances with the major movie studios and major retailers, it seems that the HD-DVD camp’s sole strategy is to undercut stand alone Blu-ray players in price.

However, if we take it as read that same holds true in Australia, it’s important to consider that what they’re talking about is stand alone players or, as they like to put it, “dedicated consumer electronics players”. From the HD DVD Promotional Group’s press release, 60% of the stand alone high definition player market in North America translates to 150,000 players sold. Note that they are excluding the Playstation 3 from their figures.

The harsh reality is that sales of the PS3 absolutely dwarf sales of stand alone players of either format and sales of the XBox360 add-on. If you’re talking about “devices that play high definition discs” rather than “stand alone players”, the ratio is on the order of 10 to 1 in favour of blu-ray hardware. Around 1.5 million PS3s have been sold in North America. Worldwide the figure is about 3.66 million PS3s sold right now. That number is only going to grow.

I’d be interested to know what the precise ratio of blu-ray hardware to hd-dvd hardware in Australia is. It would go a long way to explaining the 9-1 disc sales ratio.

I can’t see HD-DVD going anywhere. I think the software and hardware deficit is already too great to overcome.