Blu-ray vs HD-DVD, do consumers care?

Right now everyone is trying to figure out the HD-DVD and Blu-ray battle before any products even hit the market. Ironically, both Blu-ray and HD-DVD have seen endless delays. Sure, techies and journalists love to blog about the virtues of both formats, but do consumers care?

From what I’ve seen both formats aren’t even on the radar for most consumers. To research how much consumer interest there is in either format I used Yahoo’s Keword Selector Tool. It allows you to see the search volume for any keyword during the previous month. I can’t vouch for exactly how accurate it is, but it does give us a good estimate of how comparatively popular a certain search phrase is. I researched various consumer products(and related searches) and listed the results below.

Based on those results it’s easy to see that right now consumers aren’t exactly interested in either high definition format. In a lot of ways that makes sense. Neither the discs or the players have really hit store shelves yet. The marketing machines for both formats haven’t really started either. In the next few months I expect these numbers to improve, but I dont expect either format to overtake DVD anytime soon. High prices on the players and the discs, combined with a lack of cheap HDTV’s for the masses, will keep the high def movies out of most homes for a year or so, but Sony’s Playstation 3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 probably are the trump cards that both formats need to succeed. Just based on the keyword data above, if either movie format can piggyback on a game console, then they will have a solid base of gamers/techies to build a foundation of success.

In conclusion, right now most people just don’t care about HD-DVD or Blu-ray. They seem to get delayed even further each week. Neither format seems to have a real trump card over the other. I don’t forsee a real winner here. We probably won’t see either format really take off until maybe this time next year when we start seeing price drops on the first generation HD-DVD or Blu-ray players. Until that happens, neither format will be able to dethrone DVD.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 6th, 2006 at 7:49 am and is filed under Blu-ray DVD, HDTV, Playstation 3, Xbox 360. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.