Specific sales figures are still hard to come by but Nielsen VideoScan (tracking sales from mass merchants, audio/video retailers, electronics outlets, grocery stores, drug stores, and Internet sites) has released details on the Blu-Ray vs. HD DVD war. If you take the period from April 2006 to now, for each 100 HDD DVD discs sold, Blu-Ray sold 92 discs. But the figures for the first two weeks of January 2007 show quite the reversal with Blu-Ray outselling HD DVD by a 2 to 1 margin.
When looking at hardware figures, HD DVD players accounted for 52 percent of sales to Blu-Ray’s 48 percent. These numbers exclude the Blu-Ray PS3 and the HD DVD add-on for the Xbox 360.
Interestingly, a recent shopping comparison on Compete.com (a click-sharing search engine) found that during the last half of 2006, demand for both formats, as measured by the number of U.S. consumers shopping online for the respective stand-alone players, was virtually identical.
This war is far from over!