Media Wonk

PS3 not lifting Blu-ray sales, yet - March 12, 2007

I’ve made this point before, but the latest numbers on high-def hardware and software reported by Video Business make it even more pointedly: The much anticipated boost to the Blu-ray Disc format from the roll out of Sony’s Playstation 3 is yet to show up in the software numbers.

According to Video Business, Blu-ray software sales in February outpaced HD DVD sales by two-to-one. That was the same ratio as in January, although the total volume of sales in February was roughly twice that of January.

In both months, however, the number of Blu-ray titles released outpaced HD DVD releases by roughly the same two-to-one margin, suggesting differences in total sales volume tracks closely with the number of new releases in the market—just as in the regular DVD business—rather than differences in the hardware base for the respective formats.

Over the two month period, in fact, sales of set-top players for each format ran about even, according to studio sources. Over the same period, however, sales of PS3 consoles added over 350,000 Blu-ray drives to that format’s theoretical installed base, dwarfing sales of set-top players in either format.

The net result was that total Blu-ray hardware sales in January and February, including PS3 consoles as well as set-top players, outpaced HD DVD hardware sales by more than five-to-one. And yet the ratio of software sales remained stubbornly at two-to-one over that time.

Two months are just two months, of course. And the weight of PS3’s numbers may yet tell in software sales. But so far, the impact of PS3’s rollout on the studios’ software numbers has been negligible.

To be sure, one reason PS3 is not showing up more in the software numbers could be that its impact as a Blu-ray player is being matched—and thus cancelled out when looking simply at sales ratios—by Microsoft’s HD DVD Xbox 360 peripheral.

That is, whatever percentage of PS3 buyers are using their machines to play Blu-ray movies, is being matched by the number of Xbox owners buying the HD DVD add-on to watch movies, keeping the two format’s effective hardware bases more or less in step with each other.

If that’s the case, though, it means studio support of Blu-ray based on leveraging PS3 sales is misplaced because the Xbox 360 add-on is providing the same leverage for HD DVD.

It also means the $199 Xbox add-on is selling remarkably well considering the limited marketing behind it.

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