It’s Conclusive: HD DVD Wins Mind-Share Over Blu-ray
by Pravin on September 8th, 2007 in articles.
UPDATE: I’ve been debunked! It’s not really conclusive afterall. I originally meant this to be a satiricial kind of thing about making up numbers, but somewhere along the way, I lost that satirical vibe and presented it with the same bravado of those who really do officially present this kind of thing at conferences. I’m leaving the article up for your amusement or lack thereof. Meanwhile, I’ll go back and study Jonathan Swift a little more, and maybe more Jay Leno too.
Presenters from the high-def DVD camps are glad to bring out charts and stats that demonstrate how their own format is beating the other. You have to pay close attention to fully appreciate the data, or else it’s easy to get lost in the details and not understand what’s being presented. It also seems like every one of these reports comes from a flavor of the month research company, which leads to a lot of conflicting information. For example, how can two sets of reports for the same time period generate opposite results?
Data collected by a trusted source over a long period of time is probably the most meaningful. It’s even more useful when the topic is easy to understand (e.g. there’s no math). Show me a chart from an organization that everybody’s heard about, where the point being studied is simple to understand, and I’ll know for sure that somebody’s claims are for real.
I’m about to show you just such a chart.
People discount Amazon sales ranks (especially unfavorable ones) because not everyone shops there, especially for certain kinds of products, and the results can be skewed by rebates or freebies. Fair enough. My chart comes from Google, the undisputed search engine leader. No, people aren’t buying things from Google, but they do use it to get more information about stuff that’s on their mind. In fact, we use Google’s web analytics features to determine what kinds of topics are interesting to site visitors and try to put more coverage towards those items.
The topic being studied in this chart is not something specialized like, “Star Trek fans who also like Harry Potter AND want to spend less than $300 on a high-def DVD player AND also play video games but NOT on a laptop.” No, it’s something much simpler.
Without further delay, I present to you that queries for “HD DVD” have overwhelmingly topped queries for “Blu-ray” for the past four years on Google, and have not fallen below for the last two. This means that more people have HD DVD on their minds than Blu-ray.
The chart comes from Google Trends, and it shows the number of people each day who used those particular keywords in a search. Spelling variations (e.g. HD-DVD, HDDVD, Blue-ray, Bluray) did not make much difference, “HD DVD” was always on top.
What’s the significance of this chart? It shows that people are spending more time online seeking information about HD DVD compared to the other format. In fact, the most recent trend is that the gap is widening, with more people looking for HD DVD each day.
Plain and simple, no math.
September 8th, 2007 at 10:16 am
that’s interesting.
most of the reason for this is because people see an expensive blu ray player then they see a cheap and affordable HD DVD player and they get curious and look it up.
September 8th, 2007 at 10:43 am
That really doesnt tell you much. A lot of people probably have no idea what any high definiton media is so they simply put in “hd” “dvd” to learn more. Well that obviously means that hddvd will yield lots of results. Pretty silly post that is mere speculation. Majority of people do not know about the various formats like we do and so common sense to put into google if you want to learn more about upgrading would be to add high definiton in front of dvd.
September 8th, 2007 at 11:01 am
And that’s my point about all the reporting of stats and production of charts from everybody.
There’s always a way to interpret just about anything so that it makes your side look good.
Let me ask you, are you discounting this because you’re a Blu-ray supporter?
September 8th, 2007 at 1:43 pm
No. I’m discounting the information because it is irrelevent to which format has more support and cannot be interpretted to mean anything. And you are correct, BOTH sides like to interpret data in their own way and sometimes both are worng in their intrepretations. BUT I happened to see this article on your website so I commented. I have not seen such useless info on bluray.com yet. I look at both sites to keep an eye on what seems to be happening, and this article is clearly a biased intrepretation of absolutley nothing. Pravin, I don’t have a problem with you reporting HDDVD or BLURAY, BUT since this seems to be a pretty good site for REAL HDDVD inofrmation please keep it as unbiased as possible….so that people can have some REAL information, whether it is good or bad for HDDVD. It makes websites like your that much more trustworthy and respectable. So far, to be perfectly honest, Bluray.com which seems to be the most comparible site, seems to offer only real content. I like your site for info concerning HDDVD when it is real and nonobjective. Keep your personal feelings out of it, IF you want your site to be a true and respectable source of HDDVD information. This hd media war is getting annoying. lol (Pravin when its all over both sides will laugh!)
September 8th, 2007 at 1:52 pm
Thanks for your honest feedback, Tom, I really appreciate it. My desire is to not cover the format war aspect, but to just talk about HD DVD and be the “HD DVD Resource” as the site’s tagline says.
With no significant trade shows coming up, there are fewer opportunities to cover saber-rattling kinds of news, and there are actually a lot of “how-to” and tutorialish kinds of things I’ve been dying to put up.
September 10th, 2007 at 5:13 pm
Gotta agree with Tom, and it was the first that came to my mind as well. People Google HD DVD simply meaning “Hi Def DVD”, not thinking of a specific format. If HDDVD (the format) was instead named “Green-Ray”, you’d still see a huge amount of Google queries for HD DVD. The stats are meaningless.
Oh, and I have an HDDVD drive attached to my 360, and am hoping it is the format that wins out. These Google stats you present are meaningless nonetheless.
September 10th, 2007 at 6:57 pm
more inconclusive than conclusive….some real news please??
September 10th, 2007 at 10:16 pm
agreeing with tom and phil. The first time I heard about BD from disney announcement of exclusivity sometime ago, I forgot what is it, and searched HD (for High-definition), DVD and Disney. So my search was HD + DVD + Disney.
Found Blu-ray from that.
September 11th, 2007 at 2:17 pm
If you search for all different spellings of Blu-ray and HD DVD and add them together for each format then Blu-ray comes out on top, here’s the query to use:
(bluray)|(blu-ray)|(blu ray)|(blueray)|(blue-ray)|(blue ray), (hddvd)|(hd-dvd)|(hd dvd)
The parenthesis is to search for that exact phrase and the “pipes” mean logical OR so they are summed together.