Quote:
Originally Posted by ratinox
Late 2007 saw Netflix's streaming business growing (also Apple and Hulu), Blu-ray struggling, and HD-DVD stagnating. It was obvious that streaming was going to win the high-def war. Toshiba threw in the towel rather than continuing to fight an expensive format war they knew they could not win. This did nothing to improve Blu-ray sales; in fact, Blu-ray sales plummeted in early 2008:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...-been-delayed/
Netflix was synonymous with streaming for the majority at that point in time. I'm sure that Apple and Hulu contributed to the end of the HD format war but they were still relatively small names in the field compared to Netflix. That was the big name.
So yeah. Netflix killed HD-DVD. The only reason Blu-ray didn't get wiped out, too, is because Sony is frickin' huge. |
Looks to me (from the link) like you're looking at sales of hardware not media/movies. From a time when Blu-Ray was still more of a niche product for early adopters and player costs were high. If anything hurt Blu-Ray at that time it was folks not feeling the need to upgrade from their current DVD tech.
Netflix wasn't that big of a name for streaming in early 2008. As I said they didn't even start offering unlimited streaming until January of 2008 (and HD-DVD was all but dead already then) before that subscribers only got an hour of content per dollar spent on their Netflix DVD subscription. Most people didn't even know what streaming was yet at that time. Hulu didn't even launch until March of 2008.