Surprise! In competing press briefings on Sunday, the eve of CES2007, representatives for both HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc used different sets of figures and apples-and-oranges methods of determining usage of their respective players in order to claim victory in the DVD format war.
Blu-ray chief proponent Sony underscored an "installed base" of one million PlayStation 3 units, which hit the market in late 2006, since each PS3 comes equipped with an internal Blu-ray drive.
HD DVD, for its part, announced an installed base of only 175,000 players, but stressed their format's "high attach" rates. In other words, whether buying HD DVD players as a standalone or an add-on for the Xbox 360, these consumers really wanted one in order to see HD discs, while the HD DVD backers implied that most PS3 owners had yet to actually buy a single Blu-ray movie disc, according to High-Def Digest.
With or without gaming consoles in the equation, independent sales figures have not yet been made public in order to accurately determine how each format is really doing in the marketplace. It doesn't help matters that still only a relative handful of titles have been made available in either format.
