Universal Drives to Take Two-Thirds of $2 Billion High-Definition DVD Drive Market in 2012

The adoption of high definition optical drives by personal computer
manufacturers and consumers is only just beginning. Nonetheless both
Sony (with its Blu-ray format) and Toshiba (HD DVD format) have
announced their intentions to include high definition DVD drives in all
their machines.

With consumers confused about which format to buy and a relative paucity
of drives available to computer manufacturers, how rapidly will HD
optical drives enter the PC market?

“ABI Research expects high-definition drives
to bring in revenues of about $2 billion by 2012,”
says principal analyst Steve Wilson. “Of that,
about two-thirds will be accounted for by universal drives, which can
play either format. Few universal drives are sold today, partly because
of their higher price. But those prices will fall to about the same as
Blu-ray players by 2009, and we forecast universal player sales to
exceed Blu-ray the following year.”

The amount of data that must be processed for smooth presentation of
high-definition video on the computer far exceeds that of a standard
DVD, so extra graphics processing power is needed. At its most recent
Developers Forum, Intel recommended the use of dedicated HD accelerator
chips made by Broadcom. However, says Wilson, “As
with most new functions that originally require discrete processors,
high-definition video processing will gradually be integrated with
existing graphics chipsets, negating the need for a separate
accelerator. Both Intel and AMD have integrated HD support in their
roadmaps for 2008. So the market opportunity for standalone HD
processors will be limited (as little as $25 million) and short-lived.”

ABI Research’s data shows that about 30% of
consumers use DVDs for data storage. However the adequate 4 GB/disk
capacity of conventional DVD-Rs and the steep cost per gigabyte of
high-definition disks will limit consumer demand for HD as a storage
medium.

ABI Research’s new study, “High
Definition DVD for the PC Market”, examines the market for high definition DVD support in the PC market,
segmented into consumer and business class machines. Blue laser
forecasts are provided for both, broken down by format type, as well as
forecasts for each of the HD DVD, BD and universal optical disc drives.

ABI Research