How many HD DVD players does Toshiba need to sell to just break even?
The red camp loves to tout the number of players sold, just last week they were very proud to let us know that they'd sold 750k players so far. This is great, but with the BDA not saying how many they've sold, it's a number without perspective. One number that does have perspective is the weekly VideoScan numbers which are about 2:1 for the year. While it's easy to say HD DVD needs to double the number of players -- assuming the same attach rate -- there is the very debatable PS3 factor. Well, in this week's Home Media Magazine, Tom Adams of Adams Media Research is quoted as saying there will be about 370K stand-alone Blu-ray players on the streets by the end of the year. So, assuming there are over 2 million PS3s, we'd estimate that about 50% of the owners buy Blu-ray movies. Of course the other possibility is that Blu-ray actually has a better attach rate than HD DVD. Either way, anyone would have a hard time arguing that HD DVD needs to do do anything less than double the number of players on the market if they want to even break even -- and that's a lot of players.
