Quickflix has reported that its customers currently have 4041 requests for existing and upcoming HD DVD titles in its delivery queues compared to 1638 Blu-ray movie requests.

The company also said 1900 of its 17,000 subscriber base have rented or are currently requesting HD DVD titles compared with 1030 for Blu-ray.

While these figures, clearly do not represent Blu-ray and HD DVD sales or rentals in Australia as a whole, they are interesting to consider in light of the fact that more content is available for Blu-ray. Eight out of nine Hollywood studios support Blu-ray over HD DVD, with Universal being the only major Hollywood studio exclusively backing HD DVD.

In fact, Quickflix says its customers' preference for HD DVDs over Blu-ray discs comes despite the company only offering 45 HD DVD titles, compared to 80 for Blu-ray.

"Contrary to popular belief that Blu-ray has the upper hand over HD DVD, just as VHS did over Betacam in the early eighties, HD DVD has so far proved the most popular format among our ‘early adopter' customers," said Quickflix Managing Director, Stephen Langford.

"However, it's early days. Blu-ray has been the subject of a lot of interest since the release of the Blu-ray enabled Playstation 3 in March. Our customer inquiries are also skewed more towards Blu-ray, but it appears many people are waiting until the price of the new players drop and more titles are available," he added.

See: www.quickflix.com.au