Three weeks into its aggressive spring retail and marketing campaigns, the North American HD DVD Promotional Group today claims HD DVD is significantly ahead in the dedicated consumer electronics player market with 60% of all high definition stand-alone players sold.

At the same time, high definition movie sales for HD DVD reached an all time high for the month of May, exceeding 75,000 movies the last week of May alone.

“Sales of dedicated consumer electronics players are a critical indicator in the adoption of the high definition formats, given the high attach rates to these players,” the promotion group claims.

With the successive price drops by Toshiba, weekly player sales doubled in April when the price dropped from $499 to $399, doubled again during the first week of the latest promotion in late May, and increased again last week.

Consumers have purchased 150,000 dedicated HD DVD consumer electronics players which are holding a 4-to 1-movie buy-rate per stand-alone player over competing formats, according to the group. The Toshiba HD-A2 model has also reached the top-seller mark among all DVD players on Amazon.com, and is officially the best-selling next-gen DVD player model to date.

Overall high definition sales hit a record last week as well, hitting $5.2 million in actual consumer spending, which was 31% higher than the previous record for the two formats. This highlights the growing consumer appetite for HD content across the board.

Story filed 11.06.07