Launch and Sales developments
The first BD-ROM players were shipped in the middle of June 2006, though HD DVD players beat them in the race to the market by a few months.The first Blu-ray Disc titles were released on June 20, 2006. The earliest releases used MPEG-2 video compression, the same method used on DVDs. The first releases using the newer VC-1 and AVC codecs were introduced in September 2006.The first movies using dual layer discs (50 GB) were introduced in October 2006.The first mass-market Blu-ray rewritable drive for the PC was the BWU-100A, released by Sony on July 18, 2006. It recorded both single and dual layer BD-R as well as BD-RE discs and had a suggested retail price of US$699.HD DVD had a head start in the high definition video market and Blu-ray sales were slow at first. The first Blu-ray player was perceived as expensive and buggy, and there were few titles available.This changed when PlayStation 3 launched, since every PS3 unit also functioned as a Blu-ray player. By January 2007, Blu-ray discs had outsold HD DVDs,and during the first three quarters of 2007, BD outsold HD DVDs by about two to one.