Friday, February 16, 2007

A Little More

Some interesting links for you today, but a couple of comments on yesterday's long Sony post first.

Sony's consumer survey, obviously, is a complete fabrication. It's not just Sony, either--any manufacturer self-conducting and self-reporting a survey of consumers is just going to make shit up.

What is so funny, is that Sony even lies badly. Think about it: they misrepresent both consumer interest in Blu-Ray and the size of the Blu-Ray installed base by greatly exaggerating both, which makes sales of Blu-Ray discs (the one number that's independently reported) look incredibly bad.

So when Sony creates survey numbers that say 90 percent of customers have watched a Blu-Ray, and 80 percent plan to purchase a Blu-Ray movie, you bang that off the the alleged install base and the actual number of movies sold and can only come to two conclusions:
1) the 90 percent is largely made up of people who watched Talladega Nights
2) the 80 percent haven't bought a damn thing yet

This is supposed to be the hottest consumer device going, but a free movie only convinced a fraction of purchasers to buy another movie? And remember, the PS3 comes with a coupon for $15 off the purchase of a Blu-Ray movie.

And in terms of true installed base, Future Nobel Winner Brian Pilnick found a link to an interesting series of articles, including one referencing an early February article in the Wall Street Journal, which cited Adams Media Research figures indicating that only 25,000 standalone Blu-Ray players had been sold. If that's correct, and I think it's close, it means that the PS3 is well over 90% of the installed base of Blu-Ray.

Demand for both high-definition disc formats is just awful right now. There's a reason Microsoft introduced an HD-DVD add-on but soft-pedaled any promotion: they don't really want HD-DVD to succeed, and they don't think it will. What they want is for the Xbox Live Video Marketplace to take off. And believe me, they're going to start claiming numbers soon that will embarrass both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, because video on demand is much more powerful as a lure to consumers than a disc-based format.

Oh, and Phil Harrison gave an interview to 1Up this week and wasn't an asshole.

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