Cheap Deals Drive Blu-ray Black Friday Sales

The extensive adoption of the Blu-ray format wasn't going to happen without some serious deals. And it looks like the perfect muddy bath that is the economic recession and the yearly Black Friday deals finally made it happen.

Consumer's diligent search for the cheapest Blu-ray players during Black Friday led to the best sales in the format’s history, market analysts at DisplaySearch are reporting this week.

According to their findings, consumers bought about 147,000 Blu-ray players in the week leading up to the Thanksgiving holiday (not including PS3s). The average price of the Blu-ray players sold was a bit over $200, almost exactly half of the average price of the players from a year ago. So it definitely paid to wait out the Blu-ray-HD DVD format war that was going on at this time last year.

But the most revealing stat is this one: 85% of all the Blu-ray players sold were from Sony and Samsung, both of which finally gave in and offered quality players at low prices ranging from $180 to $200. The majority of the players they sold were the cheap ones.

This shows consumers are more comfortable investing in a young format with brands they know, but are also savvy enough to discern appropriate price values. But it's bad news for lesser-known companies that positioned their even cheaper players as a better alternative. When there's only an $70 difference between the cheapest Sony and a cheap Magnavox Blu-ray, they tended to go for the larger name.

But it's not like every player being sold is a Blu-ray – they only accounted for 25% of video players sold during the week. Sales of DVD players, at about $40 each, also tripled regular sales.

This is a reflection of the main problem Blu-ray has faced in the last few months and one we highlighted two months ago: In the minds of many people, Blu-ray is still not a profound improvement over DVDs and they see no reason to move onto a new format.

Still, according to DisplaySearch research director Paul Gagnon, Blu-ray player sales will go up to 5.31 million in 2009, from about 700,000 in 2007. That's a huge jump that will only be facilitated by the only fact that really matters: format adoption is a reflection of the price, and the bigger the drops by big-name companies, the closer we get to the burial of the DVD.