Across the whole holiday season 3.7 million Blu-ray units were sold in Britain, and that doesn't include sales of Sony's Playstation 3 console, which also plays Blu-ray movies. A large contributing factor to the rise in Blu-ray sales was the release of the movies The Dark Knight and Mama Mia on Blu-ray. The Dark Knight sold almost 300,000 copies in its first few weeks, becoming the fastest selling Blu-ray title to date. Mama Mia was no slouch either selling 5.1 million copies by year-end.
I still hold onto my claim that streaming video will overtake Blu-ray at some point. Streaming video is being brought even closer to the mass-market with the announcement that LG will be releasing a broadband HDTV which can stream video from Netflix without the need for a set-top box. But the recent sales numbers for Blu-ray this holiday season show that the HD format still has a lot of life in it. The shift to streaming video is still coming, it's just a long, long way off.
This story, "Blu-ray Dominates Christmas Sales" was originally published by PCWorld.