Crave

I haven't bought a DVD in more than a year. Since getting a PlayStation 3--which plays Blu-ray Discs--I just find it difficult to justify paying a slightly lower price (for a DVD) for a noticeably lower quality picture.

It wasn't always that way. There was a time when I didn't understand the appeal of Blu-ray. Now, it's difficult for me to even watch a standard DVD. Even the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy--which was the holy grail for me for DVD picture quality only a few years back--disappoints me to watch.

Sony's BDP-S360 can be found for less than $300.

(Credit: CNET)

It appears I'm not alone. According to a report released Wednesday by market research firm The NPD Group, first-quarter 2009 sales of stand-alone Blu-ray players (read: not including the PS3) in the U.S. surpassed 400,000 units, an increase of 72 percent over the first quarter of 2008. Dollar sales increased 14 percent, to reach $107.2 million.

"The rising penetration of high-definition televisions and lower Blu-ray player prices are broadening the format's market opportunity," said Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis at NPD.

Sounds likely to me, especially in the current economy.

NPD's Blu-ray Report also revealed that purchase intent for Blu-ray set-top boxes rose slightly, with 6 percent of respondents saying they would be "extremely or very likely" to buy such a device in the next six months, compared with 5 percent who responded similarly in the August 2008 report. Honestly, that barely qualifies as an increase. Still, according to the report, 58 percent of adults continue to report that they were still "not very familiar" with BD.

NPD also reports that the average selling price for a stand-alone BD player fell nearly 34 percent--from $393 dollars in the first quarter of 2008 to $261 in the first quarter of 2009, and that consumers who claim that they are likely to buy in the next six months expect to pay $214 on average.

The data for NPD's report was collected via an online survey of 6,994 consumers between February 25 and March 6.

The video game industry had better thank its lucky stars that hard-core gamers do what they do.

According to a report issued Monday morning by industry analyst firm, The NPD Group, the most active group of players, which it termed "extreme gamers," devote more than a full-time job's work week to their avocation. But they don't get insurance benefits for their efforts.

Rather, NPD's "Games Segmentation 2008" report explained, extreme gamers put in an average of 45 hours a week playing games, and, even better--for the video game industry's coffers--bought a whopping 24 titles in the last three months.

True, these committed gamers make up just 3 percent of the 174 million that NPD said play on PCs or Macs or dedicated video game machines. Still, that means 5.22 million people out there are putting in serious amounts of time gaming away. And if you stop and think about the dollars they're spending, if they're buying 24 games every three months, it's kind of breathtaking.

The NPD report identified seven different segments of gamers, including our extreme friends. The others include 9 percent who are "avid PC gamers," 17 percent who are console gamers, 14 percent who are online PC gamers, 15 percent who are offline PC gamers, 22 percent who are "young heavy gamers" and 20 percent who are "secondary" gamers.

The numbers are in for Bluetooth headset sales in California, and the retail hype around the new hands-free-driving law seems to have paid off. The law boosted device sales to four times the national average, according to a report by retail market researcher The NPD Group.

A display at a San Francisco RadioShack touts Bluetooth headsets prior to the July 1 implementation of the law.

(Credit: Holly Jackson/CNET News)

NPD said California's four largest markets--San Francisco, Sacramento, Los Angeles, and San Diego--saw a major Bluetooth boost in the months before the law went into effect effect July 1.

In March, San Francisco sold two times more Bluetooth headsets than the national average. By May that number had risen to four times the national average in all four cities.

In other U.S. cities, where laws requiring drivers to use headsets when talking on cell phones have not been implemented, Bluetooth sets sold below the national average.

While NPD will not release the amount of revenue generated by the sales, it said the data was calculated by units of Bluetooth headsets sold per store.

According to Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis for market researcher NPD, the hands-free laws have helped Bluetooth makers, which are designing new headsets due to increased consumer demand.

Update at 3:30 p.m. PDT: This post has been modified to reflect the public release by NPD of its April video game industry sales figures.

Nintendo's Wii was the best-selling next-generation video game console in April, research firm NPD Group said Thursday afternoon.

Nintendo had earlier put out its own release citing NPD's numbers.

According to NPD, the Wii outsold Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3 in April. The Wii sold 714,000 Wiis during the month, bringing its total sales in the United States since the Wii's launch in late 2006 to 9.5 million units.

NPD said that Microsoft sold 188,000 Xbox 360s in April, while Sony moved 187,100 PlayStation 3s.

For its part, Microsoft on Wednesday said it had reached the 10 million mark for total Xbox 360s sold in the U.S., making the Xbox 360 the first next-gen console to reach that number. Microsoft argued that that's a milestone that historically has been met by the eventual winner of each console generation.

The fact that the Wii came out on top in April is notable given that the industry's biggest event last month was the April 29 launch of Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto IV on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

While it's true that the game was only out for two days last month, it seemed as though it had driven significant sales of both the Xbox and the PS3.

Still, NPD said that GTA IV took two of the three top slots for software sales, with the Xbox version moving 1.85 million copies, and the PS3 version selling 1 million units.

In its own release, Nintendo touted its success with its own games during April, according to the NPD numbers.

Its Mario Kart Wii was the second best-selling game of all during the month, with 1.12 million copies sold. Overall, 6 of the top 10 best-selling games during April were Wii games.

NPD also pointed out that both the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP outsold the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The DS sold 414,800 units, and the PSP sold 192,700.

Overall, NPD's research indicates that the video game industry is doing well. It said that there was a total of $1.23 billion in game sales in April, a 47 percent increase over the $839 million sold a year earlier. Similarly, hardware sales were up 26 percent, from $339 million in April 2007 to $426 million in April 2008.

Note: On June 10, Geek Gestalt hits the highways for Road Trip 2008. I'll start in Orlando, Fla., and visit many of the South's most interesting destinations. Stay tuned, and be sure to keep up, both now and during the trip, with what I'm doing on Twitter.

A recent NPD survey cited by the New York Times' Bits blog confirms what I've suspected for a long time: the record industry's campaign against file-sharing sites is not only ineffective, but misguided. According to the survey, 19 percent of the music in consumers' collections comes from file-sharing networks. That's up 5 percent from last year--in other words, lawsuits and education campaigns have so far been ineffective.

But 38 percent of music listeners' collections come from CDs that they borrowed, then ripped to their hard drive or burned to a CD-R. (I'm not sure why NPD made the distinction between ripped and burned. I suppose it's academically interesting--ripped CDs are presumably listened to on MP3 players or computers, while burned CDs can be listened to in CD players.) In other words, file-sharing networks aren't the primary cause of declining CD sales--copied CDs are. That behavior's impossible to stamp out, and adding copy-protection software to CDs is not a viable solution--it's either ineffective or exercises too much control over the user's computer, leading to potential PR nightmares and even legal liability.

85% of the music on my Zune was recorded from a CD or LP that I legitimately own. Most of the rest comes from CDs I borrowed and ripped.

Just to satisfy my own curiosity, I took a quick look through my Zune 30, which is my primary personal MP3 player (the iPod has more family stuff on it), and catalogued my own digital music collection by origin. Here's how it stacked up:
• 2,714 songs (85 percent) from a CD or LP purchased by me or given to me as a gift.
• 439 songs (14 percent) acquired from somebody else without payment--a CD I borrowed and ripped, or that was burned for me by a friend, or given to me as digital files on a flash drive.
• 47 songs (1 percent) downloaded from an approved Internet source, such as the Zune Marketplace.
• 10 songs (<1 percent) downloaded for free from non-industry-approved Internet sources.

Obviously, I'm not a normal music consumer. I'm almost 40 years old, so much of my collection stems from the pre-Internet days, when the only real way to get music was to buy it. The question is, how does the industry make the average user look more like me? I don't know the answer, although lowering prices on CDs or promoting vinyl (which is harder to rip) with codes for one-time digital downloads might help. One area where I don't look like the ideal consumer is with digital downloads: I'm at far less than the average 10 percent. I might buy more music online if (a.) it were in a format that could be used on both my iPod and my Zune (b.) online catalogs were deeper, with more obscurities, no black-outs for long songs, and so on.

Update: This story has been changed to reflect the email from Sony touting its PlayStation 3 March performance.

With the release today of its March video game industry sales report, NPD has provided fodder for just about anyone who wants to read the numbers the way they want. Or trumpet them.

For example, in an e-mail from Nintendo, I learned that, according to NPD, "In March, Nintendo again defined industry momentum in both home and portable video game sales."

In other words, Nintendo's sales of 720,000 Wiis topped console sales. And Nintendo also dug around in NPD's report and discovered that it could also tout that it had the best-selling game, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which sold 2.7 million copies in the month.

At the same time, Microsoft weighed in with its own celebratory e-mail, which begins by stating that, according to NPD, "Consumers continue to make the ultimate vote for Xbox 360 as the console of choice."

Its rationale: That consumers have spent more on Xboxes, $9.4 billion for its entire lifecycle, than on "other game consoles."

So, we've got Nintendo saying it "defined industry momentum" and Microsoft arguing that gamers cast the "ultimate vote" for it.

And this is proof positive, of course, that numbers can be manipulated any way one wants.

Unless you're Sony, that is. I didn't see an e-mail or a press release about the PlayStation 3's March performance, either in my inbox or on the official PlayStation Web site. And the way I read the numbers, there's good reason for that: The PS3 was only the fifth-best-selling console in March--after the Wii, Nintendo's DS, Sony's PlayStation Portable, and the Xbox 360. In fact, the PS3 only barely outsold Sony's PlayStation 2.

I think it's very clear that all these companies are going to posture and fluff their tail feathers and try to elbow each other out of the way--month after month into perpetuity. And because NPD--the leader in gathering industry sales numbers--and others put out so many different metrics, there's always something for everybody to brag about. Well, almost always.

Update: I got an email from Sony after this story was published trumpeting the PlayStation 3's 98 percent sales growth from the same period a year earlier.

Mac shipments were up dramatically in the fourth quarter of last year, and if recent NPD data is any indication, Apple's doing pretty well again this quarter.

AppleInsider spotted a research note from Pacific Crest Securities citing NPD Group data that Apple's Mac shipments grew 60 percent in February compared with the same period last year, while the entire market grew just 9 percent. NPD's data tracks computer purchases made at U.S. retail stores, which means it excludes much of Dell and all online purchases in general, but it does serve as a weather vane for the PC industry.

Shipments of Macs, like this new MacBook Pro, were up 60 percent in February, according to NPD.

(Credit: Apple)

Notebooks were the primary source of Apple's strength, according to the data, with shipments up 64 percent compared with a 20 percent gain for the overall market. But the difference between Apple's desktop shipments and the industry is stark: iMac and Mac Pro shipments were up 55 percent compared with last year, while industry desktop shipments declined 5 percent.

Amid all the economic concern of the past few months, this is good news for Apple, as strong Mac growth might be enough to offset worries about the iPod division. Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray issued a note Monday that Apple's iPod shipments are tracking below expectations right now, meaning if the trends hold Apple would see a year-on-year decline in iPod shipments for the first time in an awfully long time. Munster thinks the iPod Shuffle price cut will have stimulated demand by the time the final numbers are out, but that situation bears watching.

Mac sales grew by 44 percent in the fourth quarter, Apple reported in January. February marked the first full month of availability for the MacBook Air, and Apple added new chips and new trackpad features to the MacBook Pro and MacBook in late February.

Even though we're in the middle of iPhone madness, Apple has some good news coming out of its Mac department: market share went up last month.

Remember these, iPhone fans? NPD says there's more of them out there.

(Credit: Apple)

According to NPD, Mac market share increased from 11.6 percent of the market in April to 13 percent of the market in May. Note that NPD tracks only the U.S. retail industry; those numbers include PC sales at places like Best Buy and Circuit City, but they don't include direct sales, meaning that Dell's totals are excluded.

Still, better to be going up than going down. Apple's notebook share is now 14.3 percent, up from 12.5 percent of the market in April. Desktop share was only up a fraction, to 10.4 percent from 10.2 percent in April. Apple trotted out new MacBooks in May and new MacBook Pros in June just ahead of the third-quarter back-to-school shopping season, traditionally one of the company's strongest.

Best bang for your TV buck?

(Credit: Best Buy)

It looks as if the obituary for CRT TVs will have to be postponed yet again. Sales of the bulky tube models bested the flat-panel and projection TV competition in the run up to the Super Bowl, according to data released by the NPD Group. Sales of tube TVs were up 61 percent the week before the big game (compared to the previous week), as opposed to a 40 percent jump for flat-panel LCD TVs, a 23 percent increase for plasmas, and a 25 percent rise for projection TVs (such as DLP and LCoS models).

While the sales figures may look surprising at first glance, they're really not. Millions of Americans simply refuse to spend more than $300 on a new TV. At that price, you can get either a 27-inch tube (with a built-in digital tuner) from an established name-brand manufacturer or a 19-inch flat-panel from an upstart brand. For most people, that's a no-brainer: Go with the bigger screen size, no matter what the form factor.

Found on CNET News.com.