European player sales till March

[NutsAboutPS3]

I think the problem standalone players had in the UK is nothing to do with BD-J etc, most people haven't a clue about that sort of thing. The problem is that they were WAY more expensive than HD-DVD players, with no obvious benefit to the consumer for the extra cost. Shelves in shops had similar numbers of Blu-ray and HD-DVD discs, with HD-DVD having the better quality title selection, largely due to Warner releasing far more HD-DVD titles than Blu-ray. The average consumer would just go off what they see, and wouldn't be aware that these Warner titles would all eventually be coming to Blu-ray, or what the split of studio support is.

The situation has changed now, and Blu-ray has the much stronger image in shops, plus today is a very strong release date in the UK, as is next Monday, so the Blu-ray content library will really start to shine. Most people who buy PS3s clearly don't buy them as Blu-ray players as has already been stated, otherwise there would be huge numbers of Blu-ray movies being sold, BUT anyone in the UK who wants to buy a Blu-ray player would be pretty mad to buy anything other than a PS3, so we simply can't obtain a reliable figure for how many devices have been sold to people who intend to use them primarily for playing movies. The only reliable indicator is movie sales figures - eproductwars shows that Blu-ray is clearly winning at amazon.co.uk, it would be interesting to have some overall UK or European movie sales figures.