NPD: Free Blu-ray Players Contributed to Weekly Hardware Lead
Fri Jan 25, 2008 at 09:00 AM ET
Tags: High-Def Retailing, Industry Trends (all tags)
That 93% lead for Blu-ray in hardware sales in the week following Warner's exclusivity announcement? NPD (the research group that tallied the numbers) says don't read too much into it.
That's according to a new article at BetaNews, which quotes an NPD official as saying that a series of free player bundles led to inflated weekly numbers for team Blu.
Explaining that the weekly data had not been approved for release by the research group, Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis for NPD, cautioned against making any long-term judgments based on the weekly numbers, explaining that NPD sees large fluctuations in numbers like these each week.
Baker went on to attribute the week's Blu-ray gains to several deals from Sony, Sharp and Panasonic that saw free Blu-ray players bundled with the purchase of new HDTVs. He said that player sales for Samsung (which did not offer a free Blu-ray player deal) were "almost non-existent" for the week.
All of this is not to say that it was a good week for HD DVD hardware sales. Although Baker declined to get into specifics, he did confirm a drop in overall HD DVD player sales for the week.
http://www.highdefdigest.com/news/s...yers_Contributed_to_Weekly_Hardware_Lead/1403