81:19 Nielsen/VideoScan Weekly Sales Numbers

[LynxFX]

This weeks numbers (resident evil and amazon bogo week) should be reported right in the middle of CES correct? If so, then that should make for a great talking point on the BD side.

[TheRealBob]

Originally Posted by reiella

Well, Gates makes alot of predictions that don't pan out for various reasons, which was more my point.

We're not using OS/2 Vista .

The point is a good one, but that specific example is not. OS/2 failed primarily because Microsoft went their own way, competed against it with Windows, and won. It seems rather silly to blame Gates for a missed prediction when he's the one that caused the miss (in order to have more control over the operating system).

A better example is the grand vision for their online service, MSN (which was basically their version of AOL at the time, not the current news portal). They rolled this out complete with Gates's grand vision of how Microsoft was going to provide "information at your fingertips", and while they were patting themselves on the pack the Internet came and blindsided them.

And then there's Microsoft Bob. If you look at what it did and read their literature about how this was going to revolutionize user interfaces, it's hard to believe this wasn't all a gigantic put-on. But it wasn't; they were serious. It doesn't get much more clueless than that.

I think it's rather interesting that almost everybody parrots the refrain that movie downloads are the (near) future and yet almost nobody seems to actually want them. That kind of disconnect is a serious problem. Movies are not songs. They're enormous when done right. They take time to download and massive amounts of storage space. DRM is a big problem. Consumers hate it but no way in hell will movie makers release movies without it. I see it being at least five years before there is an implementation of this that is fast, easy to use, no longer takes such a huge percentage of available storage, and has a DRM solution we can live with.

If Microsoft goes all out with a movie download service and considers it anything other than laying the groundwork for success 5+ years from now, they will have another big, embarrassing flop on their hands.

[whippersnapper]

Originally Posted by OokieSpookie

If blu gave hd "a pretty good beating" this week when hd had the best buy bogo and the amazon bogo and blu had its pants down for the most part supported only by Rush Hour 3 and Pan's I vow that I will never ever be concerned about blu again. (60+

I agree. Last week's sales (the ones reported tomorrow) were for the only week that has worried me in 2007. And NEXT week is going to be awesome.

[davidPS3]

Originally Posted by whippersnapper

I agree. Last week's sales (the ones reported tomorrow) were for the only week that has worried me in 2007. And NEXT week is going to be awesome.

Your lucky you were worried about only one week. It seems like there has been on reason or another that members were worried about a loss.

Be it a certain studio switching or going exclusive to the Transformers effect to $99 players and Red BOGO Sales.

Glad to see some calmness in this storm.

[Fozziwig]

Originally Posted by JasonR

Are they posting this weeks numbers? I heard somewhere Nielsen doesn't do the first week of the year. I might be wrong...

Nielsen VideoScan gather sales data and sell it to clients every single week of the year. There are not and never will be any gaps in Nielsen's sales data for HDM.

However, depending on what a publisher that purchases this data decides to reveal is up to them. Home Media Magazine may give us the numbers, or maybe some other kindly soul will. Sadly, Dave Vaughn has said he won't be doing any 'leaks' in 2008. Maybe he should see a doctor about that?

Either way, rest assured, the Nielsen numbers will always be out there. Somebody will track them down somehow.

[blindcat87]

DTS wasn't mandatory in DVD players when it started. Neither was component video, let alone progressive scan outputs. I am not even sure if DTS is actually a required part of the DVD player standard now. Doesn't matter though, the market demanded these features and they got them. Upconversion is not a requirement, but what is the current ratio of upconverting models to non.

Standardization is nice, but market pressures do just as well to determine hardware feature implementation. I personally never gave a damn about PIP or any of those features. About the only extras I ever access is deleted scenes, outtakes, and commentary tracks. Even when I could see well enough to have PIP stuff be more than an annoyance to me I was never interested in talking heads.

Others want it, fine. The feature is there now. Saying it should have been required is a load though. Saying a format can't survive and thrive if it is totally mature at launch is plain ignorant. One word, DVD.

As for 2.0, I think having it be optional is a great move. The only thing I want to hook a player up to the internet for is updates. While it may be paranoid, a lot of people see mandatory connectivity to be an opportunity for studios to implement a DIVX type model at some point or to use the connection for market research and feature use stats. Some people want the option to not be involved in such things whether or not the concern has any validity.

Everyone is entitled to their opinions, but saying that this is a misstep and something unheard of is just plain ignoring history. I replaced several VCRs over time to add features like auto tracking, hi fi sound, etc. I remeber buying a new LD player so that I could get images instead of a blue screen when pausing CLV discs, and another new one so that I could get DTS sound on LDS. I bought my second DVD player to add DTS, and my third one when I wanted to make use of the progressive component input on my new TV.

You can dislike the fact that new formats evolve after launch and say that it should have all been finished all you want, but to say that it is a deadly flaw for a new format is just plain revisionist history.

Chris

Originally Posted by DaViD Boulet

But it's been a year since then already. And we don't have mandatory audio decoding, PIP is just getting started, and there STILL aren't any 2.0 players or software.

That's lame.

BD zealots can try to spin the lack of featureset as a "who cares" scenario to keep hardware costs down. Well... that featureless samsung player wasn't exactly cheap... and neither are the high-end players that lack 1.1 and 2.0.

web features matter to Universal and to Warner, and to many consumers. For that reason, they should matter to the BDA. I'm stating this as a consumer who personally isn't interested in PIP or 2.0 web features. My personal preference isn't the point: there are consumers who care. And universal and warner are right: if you don't make it mandatory in the player, then how can a software vendor impliment the feauture reliably? "regular consumers" can't be expected to research the details of required and optional specifications when the shop for players. They should be able to buy a player and have it work and provide the full featureset of their software. Simple as that.

[JasonR]

Originally Posted by Fozziwig

Nielsen VideoScan gather sales data and sell it to clients every single week of the year. There are not and never will be any gaps in Nielsen's sales data for HDM.

However, depending on what a publisher that purchases this data decides to reveal is up to them. Home Media Magazine may give us the numbers, or maybe some other kindly soul will. Sadly, Dave Vaughn has said he won't be doing any 'leaks' in 2008. Maybe he should see a doctor about that?

Either way, rest assured, the Nielsen numbers will always be out there. Somebody will track them down somehow.

Good to hear. I would hate to not hear the beating we give this week. I don't know where I heard that...

I think it was at AVS.

[Caligula]

Im days behind on this thread.. too many pages to read.. so im gonna ask anyway.. Will last week numbers(tomorrow) be the last of 2007? Whats the prediction for tomorrow? DID DV leak any info?

[phloyd]

Originally Posted by blindcat87

As for 2.0, I think having it be optional is a great move.

Everyone is entitled to their opinions, but saying that this is a misstep and something unheard of is just plain ignoring history.

I agree with both statements.

For myself, internet connectivity is very low on my list. While the feature set I want is still not available, internet is not in the list of needs that is not met.

If you want to consider mis-steps, I think that the HD DVD approach of shipping a laptop as the first players in order to do everything in (buggy) software and then to rapidly drop the player pricing creating a market that no other CE wants to enter is a mis-step. But each unto their own.

It may have been nice to have an 'all at once' approach but really I don't think that it has made a whole lot of difference to anything. The reward side of that approach is not great - the cost side is anyone's guess.

In any case, it is what it is. I get the feeling that by mid year we will have a range of players to choose from at a range of price points. Will that be soon enough? Probably...

[jdsanko]

Originally Posted by HeavyHitter

Makes sense. I could not care less about profile 1.1 or any extras - why should I pay for that?

All I care about is video quality and audio codecs. I want All of the lossless codecs. The rest is meaningless to me.

[Blu Titan]

What should be the link for tomorrow? I lost track due to the holidays

[ps3andlovinit]

Originally Posted by TheRealBob

The point is a good one, but that specific example is not. OS/2 failed primarily because Microsoft went their own way, competed against it with Windows, and won. It seems rather silly to blame Gates for a missed prediction when he's the one that caused the miss (in order to have more control over the operating system).

A better example is the grand vision for their online service, MSN (which was basically their version of AOL at the time, not the current news portal). They rolled this out complete with Gates's grand vision of how Microsoft was going to provide "information at your fingertips", and while they were patting themselves on the pack the Internet came and blindsided them.

And then there's Microsoft Bob. If you look at what it did and read their literature about how this was going to revolutionize user interfaces, it's hard to believe this wasn't all a gigantic put-on. But it wasn't; they were serious. It doesn't get much more clueless than that.

I think it's rather interesting that almost everybody parrots the refrain that movie downloads are the (near) future and yet almost nobody seems to actually want them. That kind of disconnect is a serious problem. Movies are not songs. They're enormous when done right. They take time to download and massive amounts of storage space. DRM is a big problem. Consumers hate it but no way in hell will movie makers release movies without it. I see it being at least five years before there is an implementation of this that is fast, easy to use, no longer takes such a huge percentage of available storage, and has a DRM solution we can live with.

If Microsoft goes all out with a movie download service and considers it anything other than laying the groundwork for success 5+ years from now, they will have another big, embarrassing flop on their hands.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

[Pellaeon]

Originally Posted by The Shrike

Right, but you understand that it SHOULD exist, right? Just because you don't like it, you don't think it shouldn't exist, right? And, you know ME, now. I want the best possible picture/sound, AND I want good extra features. If BD hadn't had advanced technology BEYOND the ability to hold HD material, I would not be as interested. I certainly would not have become an early adopter. If I didn't enjoy the process of watching films more because of the pop-up menus, PiP and other functionality, I'm not sure I would have bothered buying another copy of AVP. But the fact of the matter is, I enjoy watching the movie far more not JUST because it looks better, but because I appreciate how the technology has enhanced the actual physical act of watching a film in ways that DVD didn't. DVD menus look like they are from the Stone Age now, with their ALWAYS shitty looking menus with simple highlight-based functionality. Even something as simple as Lost Season 3's "SeasonView" has made watching media so much more pleasant. BD is the way DVD SHOULD have been this whole time.

Fair enough. I am not all that passionate about it but I can see why they need both if nothing more than a true advancement of Media and well.. someone I know likes it

[Blu Titan]

Originally Posted by LynxFX

This weeks numbers (resident evil and amazon bogo week) should be reported right in the middle of CES correct? If so, then that should make for a great talking point on the BD side.

You are correct...Blu-ray released War, Resident Evil: Extinction and Shoot Em Up. Zilch for HD DVD as far as new or catalog releases this week. Great PR for Blu.

[xmositox]

Per David V at highdefdigest


61-39 BD for the third week in a row.

Top 5:

The Kingdom
The Bourne Ultimatum
POTC 3
Simpsons Movie
Rush Hour 3

Top 10 SI
300 Blue Ray
Transfomrers
POTC 3
Casino Royale
Planet Earth HD DVD
The Bourne Ultimatum
300 HD DVD
Spiderman 3
Planet Earth BD
Ratatouille

Notables for the week:

Volume Down from previous 2 weeks
13 of the Top 20 are BD titles.
PE on BD outsold the HD DVD 56:44, but with very low numbers overall.
There are now 9 titles over the 6 figure mark. 5-BD and 4-HD DVD.

[Raikun]

Holy crap! Huge Amazon HD-DVD BOGO, and they still lost that badly?

[Rob Tomlin]

Originally Posted by xmositox

Per David V at highdefdigest


61-39 BD for the third week in a row.

Top 5:

The Kingdom
The Bourne Ultimatum
POTC 3
Simpsons Movie
Rush Hour 3

Top 10 SI
300 Blue Ray
Transfomrers
POTC 3
Casino Royale
Planet Earth HD DVD
The Bourne Ultimatum
300 HD DVD
Spiderman 3
Planet Earth BD
Ratatouille

Notables for the week:

Volume Down from previous 2 weeks
13 of the Top 20 are BD titles.
PE on BD outsold the HD DVD 56:44, but with very low numbers overall.
There are now 9 titles over the 6 figure mark. 5-BD and 4-HD DVD.

I was off by only 1% (I guessed 62-38).

[badboi]

Bloody Hell. Are the red side ever going to win one week?

Even with all those secret A2/A3's hiding under the Christmas trees ready to dessimate Blu Ray, all the BOGO and Buy One Get Ten Free deals, these buttwipes can only get 39%. Pathetic.

[GregBlu5]

Originally Posted by xmositox

Per David V at highdefdigest


61-39 BD for the third week in a row.

The kind of consistency we can all celebrate!

[xmositox]

Wow HD-DVD had 3 day and dates, Best Buy and Amazon BOGOs and they still couldn't get the win. If anything, I thout we would lose this week.

BD only had Rush hour 3...... Un - fugging -believable