CES: Blu-ray Now In 27.5M U.S. Homes By Phillip Swann TVPredictions.com
http://www.tvpredictions.com/blu010711.htm Washington, D.C. (January 7, 2011) -- Blu-ray players are now in 27.5 million U.S. homes, according to the Digital Entertainment Group, an organization that represents companies involved in the high-def disc industry. PC World reports that Andy Parsons, chairman of the Blu-ray Disc Association, said yesterday at the Consumer Electronics Show that sales of Blu-ray titles have doubled in the last year. "That's bucking the trend with what's going on with packaged media in general," said Parsons, referring to declining DVD sales and rentals. DVD sales and rentals fell 11 percent in 2010 to roughly $14 billion. The DEG reports that Blu-ray sales and rentals jumped 53 percent in 2010, rising to $2.3 billion. By comparison, Video on Demand rentals generated $1.8 billion in 2010 while digital downloads (rentals and sales of movies streamed over the Net) brought in $683 million. The news is good for Blu-ray enthusiasts who have predicted that the high-def disc format would eventually replace the DVD. The number of homes with HDTVs is now more than 50 million, which means that Blu-ray is in half of the homes with high-def sets. "If you look at the adoption rate of the market we could sell into, almost everyone could buy a DVD, be it a PlayStation 2 or standalone DVD, because everyone had an SDTV," says Parsons, according to PC World. "Blu-ray was selling the same number of units as DVDs, but it was doing so into less than half the market size, because not everyone had an HDTV yet. So that really means the adoption rate has picked up much faster than DVD." Blu-ray player sales are expected to rise again in 2011 with the emergence of Net-enabled units which allow users to watch streaming videos from Netflix, Vudu and other services. However, the streaming videos could cut into the sales and rentals of the Blu-ray disc. -- ======================================== George Antunes, Political Science Dept University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204 Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927 Mail: antunes at uh dot edu _______________________________________________ Medianews mailing list [email protected] http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
