A silver lining for Blu-ray

By Carl DiOrio

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Blu-ray Disc player sales were strong through the holidays, and even the season's so-so disc sales went well enough to sustain industry hopes that the format can still become a next-gen cash cow for the studios.

That's the broad, instant analysis of how Blu-ray hardware and software fared during the fourth quarter. Industry trade organization Digital Entertainment Group is expected this week to release detailed breakdowns of 2008 Blu-ray and DVD sales as well as projections for the high-def format and its traditional-disc forebear.

Two elements loom large:

-- Industryites hoped holiday gift purchases of Blu-ray players and discs helped the format gain a firmer market hold.

-- The global economic crisis put a crimp on consumer spending.

Happily for Blue-ray proponents, player prices were slashed dramatically for the Black Friday kickoff to the holiday shopping season -- in many cases as low as $200, long considered a key price point for consumer acceptance of such technology. That was a little late in the game to bolster high-def disc sales, but Blu-ray machines fairly jumped off store shelves once retailers dropped prices on the hardware.

On Monday, Adams Media Research said fourth-quarter player sales went so well that the research firm was raising its estimate of Blu-ray households in the U.S. from a previously projected 2.9 million to 3.1 million by year's end.

"On the hardware front, things went exceedingly well," said Tom Adams, president of the Carmel Valley, Calif.-based research firm. "On the other hand, it all happened so late in the year that it didn't drive software sales as much as we had projected."