Blu-ray disc sales up more than 150%

Blu-ray players and discs flying off the shelves
Blu-ray players and discs flying off the shelves

The Blu-ray Video Association is celebrating what they are seeing as a "breakthrough year" for Blu-ray, with November's disc sales up 165 per cent from October.

Accounting for 21 per cent of all these sales was The Dark Knight – marking the movie out as what The Matrix did for DVD sales way back in 1999.

Speaking of the humble DVD, the BVA is also claiming that sales of Blu-ray Discs are actually much faster than the rate DVDs sold more than a decade ago.

Unparalleled home entertainment experience

Speaking about the upsurge in sales, Jim Bottoms, Managing Director, Corporate Development, at Futuresource, the company who compiled the statistics said: "The Blu-ray disc format offers an unparalleled home entertainment experience, something all those involved with this technology have always known.

"We fully expect Blu-ray to keep on bucking the current economic trend and continue its rapid growth over the next few months and beyond, stimulated by falling prices and even more bundling deals with large screen TVs."

In other Blu-ray related news, the sale of BD players is set to triple in 2009, with an estimated 2.5 million players to be sold in the UK.

As this figure does not take into account the sale of PlayStation 3s, despite the economic downturn, the future for Blu-ray is looking very bright indeed.

Marc Chacksfield

Marc Chacksfield is the Editor In Chief, Shortlist.com at DC Thomson. He started out life as a movie writer for numerous (now defunct) magazines and soon found himself online - editing a gaggle of gadget sites, including TechRadar, Digital Camera World and Tom's Guide UK. At Shortlist you'll find him mostly writing about movies and tech, so no change there then.