Last week we reported on recent Blu-ray sales surpassing HD DVD. Part of this reason could be due to Sony bundling Blu-ray movies and vouchers with some PS3 games consoles.
This could mean that hundreds of thousands of Blu-ray movies have been given away free to consumers courtesy of Sony, who obviously have a lot to gain from the mass adoption of Blu-ray.
It feels a bit unfair to include freebies in these results. After all, most people won't turn down free films if they can play them on their newly purchased console. HD DVD, on the other hand, has only seen a few film bundles from drive manufacturers.
Whether this reported Blu-ray advantage continues when consumers have to pay for their films remains to be seen.
You failed to mention that Microsoft is bundling King Kong with its HD-DVD add-on. Not to mention bundled HD-DVD movies when you buy stand-alone HD-DVD player from Toshiba.
By the way, the free Blu-ray disks that come with PS3 is limited to the first 400K units, which was long reached in December 2006.
Get your facts!
Nielsen stated that they track point-of-sale data where the customer makes the exclusive decision to purchase discs...therefore bundled movies are excluded.
In addition, only the 1st 500,000 ps3s had the free movie, and those were sold out in 06. The so called vouchers in this article are actually $10 rebates on select movie titles. Since movies cost $20-30 at least, this is not even close to a free movie.