HD DVD Continues To Fade Away, Slowly

Hmm, Home Media Magazine wasn’t out on Friday as it normally is (I’m guessing due to the holiday), but I just checked it and it is up now. For the week ended 3/16 HD DVD took 22% of the market to Blu-ray’s 78%, putting them 76:24 year-to-date and 66:34 since inception. But with the last of the big studio HD DVD releases gone, the best HD DVD placed in the top 10 sellers was ninth, with American Gangster. Tenth also went to HD DVD, with Beowulf. Personally I was happy to see a niche anime title like Appleseed: Ex Machina placing fourth, and selling 12.27% of the volume of first place No Country for Old Men. I’ve read other reports that Appleseed moved roughly 30% of its volume on Blu-ray, the rest being DVD. (It placed 16th on the DVD sellers list.) Which shows that niche markets, like anime fans, tend to be early adopters – anime fans also jumped on LaserDisc and DVD earlier than the general market.