While basic intuitive thinking might reach the conclusion that as a new medium emerges—and it's obvious it will be around for a while—its market share for the consumer dollar will continue to grow (either quickly or slowly)—but grow, nonetheless. While that will probably prove to be true for Blu-ray discs in the long run, its short-run share of the video-disc pie has hardly been on a steady increase over the past year. That could change dramatically by the end of the upcoming holiday sales season, however, where some big-box retailers already have begun slashing Blu-ray disc price points.
Still, for much of the past 12 months or so, depending partly on various weekly title releases — and in the case of Blu-ray, how much those titles attract young consumers — Blu-ray seems to have hit an average of 16-percent share compared to standard DVD, and has plateaued there for a while.
In fact, according to the latest available sales data, Blu-ray's share has temporarily shrunk a bit. For the week ending Nov. 8, Blu-ray disc revenue was $28 million. While that's up more than 230 percent for Blu-ray over a year ago, it represents only 14 percent of video-disc sales compared to DVD ($168 million; 86 percent), according to Home Media Research.
Standard DVD sales, although mostly declining in the past several quarters, were actually up slightly (albeit a mere 2.65 percent over the same early November week in 2008).
Overall, combined DVD and Blu-ray U.S. sales reached just below $196 million for the same week, which was up nearly 14 percent over last year.
