Nickerson: High-def first year golden

EMX: Warner exec forecasts title spending up to $500M in Q4

By Susanne Ault -- Video Business, 8/8/2006

AUG. 8 | UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif.—During August and September, consumer spending on HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc titles will total $10 million, jumping to between $225 million and $500 million during the fourth quarter, said Warner Home Video senior VP of marketing management Steve Nickerson during the Tuesday keynote of the Entertainment Media Expo here.

Reiterating forecasts he has made before, Nickerson said that based on these and other estimates, the adoption of high-definition discs should be faster than that of standard DVD.

“Sales of the two formats will be faster than DVD, which has been up to this point the most successful consumer electronics product launch,” Nickerson said.

He forecast that fourth-quarter hardware sales will total $1.5 billion to $1.9 billion.

Nickerson estimated that by the end of this year, 500,000 HD DVD and Blu-ray set-top players will be sold, as well as 2 million to 3 million game consoles and 2 million to 4 million computers that have high-def capability.

A year after the launch of the standard DVD format, 305,000 DVD set-top players were sold, Nickerson said.

Four years later, as more standard-DVD-capable hardware was launched, 35 million DVD consumer electronics devices were in the market.

But Nickerson said that four years after HD DVD and Blu-ray launched, there will be 100 million devices capable of playing high-def media.