The Harris Poll in June on usage of Blu-ray Disc and now-defunct HD DVD may have raised a few eyebrows when it concluded that the two formats were nearly neck-and-neck in current popularity. But the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) says the survey was flat-out wrong when it concluded that more consumers owned standalone HD DVD players (11%) than Blu-ray units (7%).
But games got in the way because complicating the data (HD Notebook, June 26) is the fact that all Sony PlayStation 3 game consoles come with built-in Blu-ray drives. While that's not the case for Microsoft's Xbox 360 and HD DVD, the latter game console does offer an HD DVD drive as add-on hardware.
The Blu-ray group said the Harris survey's conclusions don't square with real-world shipping and sales numbers for Blu-ray, among other things. The BDA said according to other data from Adams Media Research (AMR), more than 7 percent of homes owned a Blu-ray drive, while HD DVD homes came in at under 1 percent. By the end of 2009, the BDA said in a statement, Blu-ray will be in more than 14 percent of American households.
Part of the problem with the widely different numbers, according to AMR, is that a lot of consumers don't know the difference between either HD disc format, or think that any standard DVD player hooked up to an HD set is also an HD disc player.
AMR said it has conclusive data that proves the Harris Poll findings were just plain wrong. The Harris Poll had no immediate response except that it, too, was reviewing its data.
