If we look at the CEA DVD player sales, we can find out that DVD player sales between April 06 and August 07 were about 30,150,000 units (I had to extrapolate the last week of August). 1.3 percent of that is 391,950.

So it follows that:

Since inception to August 2007, next-gen set-tops (Blu-ray and HD DVD, all models) totaled about 400,000 units.

Now based on previous figures and press releases regarding SA sales ratios from Toshiba this would give an approximate break down of:

Period……………Blu Ray……….HD-DVD
2006……………..……35k………………80k
0107-0807……..…125k…..………160k
Since Inception….160k…………..240k

There were 80k HD-DVD add-ons for XBOX sold at the end of 2006. If they continued selling at the same 1:1 ratio (doubtful), that means there could be around 240K add ons as well putting the HD-DVD total at 480k.

Bit of a contradiction in stats, don’t you think? Interesting to find out the actual figures

http://www.smh.com.au/news/articles/hd-dvd-aims-to-drive-sales-with-price-cut/2007/10/15/1192300655298.html

Generally, I find the quality of reporting by “technology reporters” in newspapers or morning news programs to be poor. Sections such as following for example are quite disappointing:

“The HD DVD camp is banking on the latest round of player price cuts to drive sales in the lead up to Christmas. Presumably, the fact that HD DVD is an extension of the existing DVD format, rather than an entirely new technology like Blu-ray, has allowed disc and player manufacturers to reduce their production costs quickly.”

HD DVD and Blu-ray have more in common with each other than either of them have in common with DVD and why propagate the disc manufacturing cost myth? It’s probably just due to muddle headed thinking.

The disc replication cost of the two formats is essentially equivalent, with Blu-ray being cheaper per gigabyte. Getting the pricing information from any actual, factual disc replicator is proof enough of that. Here’s one:

http://www.proactionmedia.com/

Blu-ray will achieve economies of scale more rapdily than HD DVD. Not only are more discs getting moved for high definition movies, but every PS3 game on the shelf is on a Blu-ray disc. The hardware is proliferating. 5 million PS3s world wide now, bound to be many more after Christmas. It’s regrettable that HD DVD is going to thrash around for another 18 months or so. Particularly as flagship HD DVD titles can’t deliver all the audio options due to space limitations:

http://hddvd.highdefdigest.com/1110/transformers.html

I’m sure the 1.5mbps English Dolby track sounds great, but it could have sounded better. And that, frankly, is entirely the point when it comes to high definition discs.