It seems that last week's claim from Paramount that Transformers sold 190,000 copies in its first week may be a bit of a porkie-pie.
Or, as Hollywood reporter Nikki Finke put it, a "big ass, fat, stupid lie".
Two unnamed Blu-ray studios (obviously) have claimed that Paramount boosted the numbers in order to make sales look good — something they needed to do after they were paid so much to go HD DVD exclusive.
The anonymous Blu-ray executive said:
"In an overreaching effort to make a press claim - the number one high def title position for any format - for Transformers, they've gone beyond exaggeration. Here's the dumb lie: they've claimed to sell 100K in one day and 190K in one week."
"Exact point of sale data from three retailers that make up 62% of the high-def market show sales of 73K units for the week. Being very generous, they could possibly reach 125K-130K, which would barely set a record for HD DVD. And they couldn't have flooded rental stores since Blockbuster doesn't stock HD DVD. It’s an outrage. They think they can say whatever they want and that no one will call them on it. They need to be called on it."
Paramount say that their figures include online retailers such as Amazon, Netflix, and Blockbuster Online, though the Blu-ray executive counters that, claiming that Paramount already knew that Nielsen's reporting included Amazon and BO.
The wrangling continues.
(Via Pocket-Lint)
Great article - tellin' it like it is!!
This demonstrates nothign but sour grapes on the BlueRay consotium and "insider's" part.Why don't the pay attention to their own numbers and lower prices like HD-DVD did.In the end the consumer doesn't care about the war crap.What they do care about is being ableto get into HD video as cheap as possible with as many movies to choose from as possible(also at reonable pricing).So far BlueRay has not demonstrated it can do either while HD-DVD has.
At last firemen have put out a big forest fire in California. Since then, they have been trying to find out how the fire began. Forest fires are often caused by broken glass or by cigarette ends which people carelessly throw away. Yesterday the firemen examined the ground carefully, but were not able to find any broken glass. They were also quite sure that a cigarette end did not start the fire. This morning, however, a firemen accidentally discovered the cause. He noticed the remains of a snake which was wound round the electric wires of a 16,000-volt power line. In this way, he was able to solve the mystery. The explanation was simple but very unusual. A bird had snatched up the snake from the ground and then dropped it on to the wires. The snake then wound itself round the wires. When it did so, it sent sparks down to the ground and these immediately started a fire.