Blu-ray Player Sales Triple

Blu-ray Disc player sales for the week of Thanksgiving and Black Friday more than tripled from a week earlier after Sony and Samsung dropped prices.

Prices were discounted for entry-level machines to below $200 to generate holiday demand, NPD Group unit DisplaySearch said today. Meanwhile, Black Friday TV revenue fell from a year earlier as retailers discounted prices on larger liquid-crystal display sets.

Consumers paid more than $30 million for 147,000 Blu-ray players during a week in which the average price was slightly more than $200, down from about $240 the previous week, DisplaySearch said. About one in four video-disc players purchased for the week ended Nov. 29 were Blu-ray machines. Sales of Sony's PlayStation 3 videogame console, which includes a Blu-ray player, weren't included in the DisplaySearch figures.

Sony and Samsung, selling their cheapest Blu-ray players for $179 and $199, respectively, accounted for 85% of Black Friday week sales and helped unit sales also triple from the week ended Nov. 22.

Wal-Mart appealed to bargain-minded shoppers by offering Blu-ray players for as low as $128.

With continued sales growth through the holiday season, Blu-ray player makers will ship 911,000 machines during the fourth quarter and about 2.2 million for the year, according to DisplaySearch.

"Blu-ray had a pretty good Black Friday," Paul Erickson, director of DVD and HD market research at DisplaySearch, said in a conference call today. "This is primarily due to one factor: sub-$200 pricing."

As Blu-ray player sales tripled for the week, so did sales of standard-definition DVD players, whose average price was about $40. Next year, Blu-ray player sales will surge 76% to 3.84 million units while DVD player sales will fall 24% to about 14 million units, DisplaySearch forecasts.

Meanwhile, Black Friday's trend of falling prices affected TV sales as well. Although sales for Black Friday itself, Nov. 28, were little changed from a year earlier at about 990,000 units, revenue fell 2% to about $670 million as retailers pocketed about the same average price for liquid-crystal display TVs despite selling them at larger sizes. Customers also bought more plasma TVs because they cost less per screen inch than LCDs.

"Black Friday unit volume was on par with a year ago, but it really required a lot of discounting," Paul Gagnon, director of North American TV research at DisplaySearch, said on the call. "It wasn’t as negative as many expected, but it certainly wasn’t a positive result."

With retailers engaging in such discounting, U.S. bricks-and-mortar sales of consumer electronics goods for Black Friday week fell from a year earlier for the first time, NPD said in a separate report today. Electronics spending for the week ended Nov. 29 dropped 8.4% to $2.03 billion after increasing 6% last year and 12% during the Black Friday week of 2006, according to NPD.