According to the Digital Entertainment Group (DEG), Blu-ray software sales rose 68% in 2010, with $1.8 billion sales revenue. BD rentals were also up 24% in brick-and-mortar outlets. Regarding hardware, 11.25 million Blu-ray playback devices – including set-top players and game consoles – sold in calendar 2010 (six million of them in the fourth quarter).
Overall, home entertainment spending was $18.8 billion, down 3%.
The total number of Blu-ray playback devices in U.S. households increased to 27.5 million, up 62%.
More than 170 million Blu-ray Discs shipped to market in calendar 2010 (73 million in the fourth quarter). Nearly 350 million Blu-ray Discs have shipped since launch.
Sales of catalog titles on Blu-ray are up 52%, according to
PC World citing DEG figures.
"We continued to see strong growth in Blu-ray and significant gains in digital distribution this year, despite a tough economy," said Ron Sanders, President, DEG and President, Warner Home Video. "We also saw a slight increase in consumer transactions, which is a clear indication that consumer demand for home entertainment remains healthy."
Speaking of digital distribution, it is worth mentioning that DEG estimates that spending from that sector grew just 19%. Electronic sellthrough was particularly soft, contributing just $683 million to the home entertainment market (a growth of 15.7% year on year).
Tom Adams, principal analyst and director, US Media, for Screen Digest, went as far as
declaring that network delivery "failed to live up to the hype" in 2010. "Despite years of big growth and even bigger hype, the network-delivered rental and sale of videos continued to represent only a small portion of the U.S. home video entertainment market in 2010, as consumers flocked to buy and rent Blu-ray discs," observed Adams after looking at Screen Digest's figures.
Andy Parsons, U.S. promotions committee chairperson for the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) and Pioneer Electronics USA senior VP, commented separately to
Twice that he expected physical and digital to coexist "for many years to come" and likened this situation to "the infamous 'paperless office' that everyone predicted we'd have 20 years ago. The lesson we learned from that was that imagining how something might happen is the easy part, but it turns out there are many complications that crop up."
Sanders added as well: "Given the infrastructure issues and the amount of data a digital delivery system can put on the screen, it's going to be a very long time before the average consumer is going to be able to get a true Blu-ray quality picture and sound on their high definition displays through any means of conveyance other than a Blu-ray Disc."