Analyst firm says explosion in Blu-ray sales doesn't mean much

Port Washington (NY) - Earlier this month, standalone Blu-ray players counted for 90% of the next-gen DVD hardware market, but analyst firm NPD says that consumers shouldn’t read too much into that.

For the week ending January 12, Blu-ray players outsold HD DVD players by a margin of 9-to-1. That was just including standalone players, meaning the Playstation 3 is not skewing the results. The Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on was also not included.

However, "One week doesn’t really mean a lot," said Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis for NPD. That week in particular, there were numerous promotions for free Blu-ray players with the purchase of an HDTV. Big box retailers also discounted some players that week to their lowest advertised price to date.

"With promotions, it’s very easy to manipulate a week’s worth of sales," said Baker. "We cannot make judgments based on one week’s worth of data."

When excluding the PS3 and Xbox 360 add-on, HD DVD player sales have typically outperformed Blu-ray, largely because of HD DVD’s price advantage. However, Blu-ray Disc movies continue to outsell HD DVD titles by margins of 2-to-1 or greater.