Futuresource Consulting's Jim Bottoms Comments On Toshiba's Announcement That It Will Join The Blu-ray Disc Association

August 11, 2009

Our quarterly BD hardware tracker shows European BD player sales, excluding PS3, are running at close to 300 percent up on the equivalent period last year and clearly Toshiba is keen to get its share of this business. Retail prices are declining fast and we expect to see players at or below £80/100 Euros by the Christmas selling season. BD players will approach impulse purchase level very soon and at these levels people will be increasingly tempted to replace DVD players with the new format. Although paid-for movie downloads are also impacting the marketplace, mainstream adoption will be a much more gradual process, giving BD the competitive edge. Just 12 pecent of U.S. consumer expenditure on home video will originate from online in 2012, with a slightly lower proportion in Europe. BD disc sales continue to expand into all major markets and genres. In particular, the action adventure genre dominates, appealing strongly to the young male technology adopter, which also closely matches the PS3 owner profile. For some high profile titles, close to 25 percent of all disc sales have been on BD. With more than 1,100 BD titles to choose from, combined with growing retail support and increased promotional activity, the rise of Blu-ray will help to offset declining sales of standard DVD product. By 2012, around 50 percent of U.S, and 35 percent of Western European video disc retail sale volumes will be Blu-ray. Focusing on the UK, this year we expect both BD player and BD disc sales to more than treble – and this is certainly being borne out by our quarterly player and disc tracking. On this basis, UK disc sales could hit 12 million given the strong release schedule for Q4.

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