If the temperature during the Blu-ray Disc Association's press conference is any indicator, it will indeed be, in the words of Disney's Bob Chapek, be a Happy Blu Year indeed. While no one is outright calling Warner Brother's decision to back Blu-ray exclusively as the end of the format war, clearly studio and hardware executives backing Blu-ray are excited about being able to focus their efforts on educating consumers about the new disc format, and not on trying to compete with another format.
Meanwhile, recent sales numbers discussed at the event illustrate some of the reasons why Warner made the decision that it did. Blu-ray Disc movie titles outsold HD DVD in the United States by a nearly 2-to1 margin last year, according to sales figures from Home Media Research. Moreover, Blu-ray titles outsold HD DVD in the United States every single week of 2007, and the Blu-ray editions of titles released on both formats consistently outsold their HD DVD counterparts, often by "significant" margins. Total domestic sales of Blu-ray movie titles topped six million in December 2007. It took 10 months for Blu-ray sales to reach the first one million; from there, every three months the format racked up another million titles sold. The last two million worth of discs sold occurred in the past month alone. By contrast, according to Home Media Research's numbers, HD DVD didn't reach the 2.5 million mark until mid-November.
Another toll of the bell for the death of HD-DVD. Will this format survive even another year? I think not...