Archive notice: This article was originally published on January 29, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
According to a current NPD Group market analysis, US market shares shifted within one week from a 50–50 split to a 90–10 distribution in favour of Blu-ray. Gartner even said Blu-ray would prevail by year end and that Toshiba’s aggressive pricing could not change this.
Frank Kretzschmar, managing director of the MediaMarkt/Saturn electronics chain in Austria, said the Warner Bros. decision appeared to favour Blu-ray, though the outcome was not yet settled. Manufacturers of combination drives for HD DVD and Blu-ray were benefiting from the uncertainty, and for them device sales mattered more than the winning format. GfK reported that Germany sold twice as many Blu-ray players as HD-DVD players in the second week of January 2008.
Analysts were sceptical that one week of NPD data in the US demonstrated a definitive global shift. Toshiba considered the decline in HD DVD player sales a consequence of Christmas-season discounting and noted that many Blu-ray players were sold with flat-screen TVs.
Some analysts warned that a weekly snapshot was not a long-term trend. Gartner nevertheless regarded HD DVD resistance as futile, citing Toshiba price cuts of up to 50 percent to about US$150 and the format’s weaker film catalogue. Toshiba’s Super Bowl slogan, “For $149, HD DVD is still worth it,” was seen as evidence of the pricing pressure facing the company in 2008.
