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US HD hardware sales 3:1 in Blu-ray's favour by year end

US households will together own 948,000 HD DVD playback devices and almost 3m Blu-ray Disc-capable machines come the end of 2007, market watcher DisplaySearch has estimated.

Breaking those numbers down, we get 2.5m PlayStation 3s, 678,000 HD DVD players, 461,000 Blu-ray Disc players and 270,000 Xbox 360 add-on drives, DisplaySearch said via Home Media Magazine.

Add those numbers up and for every living room-oriented HD DVD device out there, there are three Blu-ray machines.

That statistic may well give Warner's home entertainment division pause for thought if it is indeed waiting to see each format's end-of-year hardware sales before deciding whether to back a single format as some industry insiders have alleged it's considering.

For its part, Warner's only comment on the matter has been to state it has "made no decision to change our present policy which is to produce in both HD DVD and Blu-ray".

Newspaper columnist Don Lindich maintains this statement's lack of a denial or ambiguous language, not to mention the fact the Warner issued it quickly, is a sign that no move's on the cards.

However, Warner's statement doesn't contradict the aforementioned claims, which suggest it's waiting to see the numbers before casting its lot one way or another. Until then, of course Warner is going to maintain its support-both-formats policy. ®

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