Expected HD DVD Sales?

I doubt Toshiba doesn't even know those stats as poorly as the role out has been.

 http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060317-6405.html


"From October to December, we expect at least $250 million to possibly as much as $750 million in sales industrywide," said Steve Nickerson, senior vice president of market management for Warner Home Video. Nickerson said Warner Home Video was forecasting industry-wide sales of next-generation DVDs of $35 million to $40 million in April to September, as electronics makers and studios begin to release the next-generation DVD players and movies."


They may be including BD and HD DVD. Someone on the forum said he heard that Toshiba had so far sold 25k players to North America but really who knows what the figures really are. I also seem to remember Toshiba saying they expected to sell some 600k players before the end of the year but then at the rate they are shipping I don't see that happening unless they out source their production and do it soon.

25,000? HAH.


Going by what I've heard about what the actual video sales are like, it's far closer to 3000 decks in the US having been sold. There was word recently that Toshiba put 6000 players into retailers hands and half of those ended up being gobbled up by competitors, displays or other uses. The guesstimate of how many have landed in consumers hands is about 3000.

I don't want to break forum rules, but it appears a major online site has hd-dvd players in stock now (even advertised on the front page of the site). Another site indicates more are coming soon so order now.

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That's software, right? With current prices, that's more than 1.5 million copies sold in April to September. I know attach rates are very high on this forum, but still...

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Chris, 25,000 combined A1 and XA1 players were shipped in the US to date.


-Robert

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Source? Please, something better than your so-called "very good contacts at Toshiba".

Ah, the 3000 number you can live with. No need for a source for that. But when a large authorized dealer put's out a number than a"very good contacts at Toshiba" isn't good enough.

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I can't provide my sources in detail because I work with a number of studios but all of them have access to the sell through numbers for DVDs and are extrapolating from there what the player sales are like based on many years of historical data to work with.


I'd love to see the 25,000 source though as everything has been pegged at around 10,000 but we've seen articles stating 6000 by Toshiba folks (it was in the main thread, I don't recall the specific date but it was obviously in the last week or two).

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Shipped != sold to consumers which is what I'm talking about.

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Chris did qualify his statement with "Going by what I've heard about what the actual video sales are like...", so it is obvious it is extrapolation, and he's not presenting it as something else.


OTOH, DTVTVD presented his claims as hard data: "25,000 combined A1 and XA1 players were shipped in the US to date". Which goes against everything we have heard from multiple sources. Hence, it is up to him to back that up.

This article from April 20th says that the initial shipment of players consisted of 10,000-15,000 players shipped to 3,000 stores. It also says that initial shipment was sold out after just 2 days.

http://www.guidetohometheater.com/news/042006hddvd/

And a quick bit of googling gets us this 05/04 article:

http://gear.ign.com/articles/705/705157p1.html

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Thats exactly what most of the industry reports have - shipped - including CEA. They rarely have real sold numbers (because its very difficult to get accurate numbers for thousands of retailers).

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That is just a misquoted repeat of this article. The actual quote is:

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Mid April is when it was released, no? Unless you deny that Toshiba has restocked, you would have to assume that in North America alone you have more than 6K units by now. Or do you assume that Toshiba hasn't shipped anymore units after they're initial release?

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11,000 units is a far cry from 25,000.

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That works for me. So we're figuring 11,000 players then which may not have moved completely into retail yet or just now arriving based on some posts made to other HD DVD threads. The 11,000 figure is much closer to what I was talking about than the 25,000 that Robert is talking about.


As I said before, what I'm basically hearing from a couple of sources with hard figures is that the HD DVD titles during the first couple of weeks were moving a couple thousand copies and that's it, which A) isn't surprising considering how few players actually made it into consumers hands at launch and B) how soft the launch is.

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Yes, but that is from over a week ago, and is for North America alone.


You claim 11,000 is a far cry from 25,000. To me, both seem rather small, but you're entitled to think that's a big difference if you want. My only point is that we can't keep using the initial shipment as the number that has been currently released. It's an ongoing process and more are being shipped as weeks go by. For example, Walmart will roll out the RCA version soon to at least some of it's 3K stores. Even though we may not get a press release stating that more HD DVD's have shipped, by virtue of the fact that they are on the Walmart shelf will tell us that they have.

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I don't have any idea what the actual number is. I'm just saying that we can't keep using the initial release data as the current number shipped, if we assume that they are shipping more from time to time.