Posted by Ian on May 15th, 2008 at 11:04 AM CST

As we reported a few weeks ago, sales of standalone Blu-ray players have been down since January. To find out why, Harris Interactive surveyed 2,529 U.S. adults and found that only 9% owned a Blu-ray player or Playstation 3. Of the rest, only 9% planned on buying a Blu-ray disc player within the next year.

While many people expected sales of Blu-ray disc players to spike when Toshiba decided to drop out of the high-definition HD DVD market in February 2008, according to a new Harris Poll, it seems that the recently resolved high definition format war is not motivating consumers to purchase the advanced DVD players any time soon. The Harris Poll® of 2,529 U.S. adults surveyed online between April 7 and 15, 2008 by Harris Interactive® found that:

• Ownership of standard DVD players is practically ubiquitous (87%);
• Few report owning Blu-ray disc players (4%), Sony PlayStation 3 (5%), HD DVD players (6%) and the HD-DVD drive for the Xbox 360 (1% have external drive while 9% have an Xbox 360);
• Only nine percent of non-Blu-ray player owners report being likely to purchase a Blu-ray disc player within the next year, even when made fully aware that Blu-ray is considered to be the definitive technology for high definition DVD players going forward;
• Two-thirds of consumers are familiar with the recently resolved high-definition format war (67%) and seven in ten of them have heard that Blu-ray is the unofficial winner (69%);
• Nearly a quarter (23%) of those aware of the format war report that they had been waiting for the rivalry to play itself out before purchasing a high definition player, but by April they had yet to do so;

While research groups can forecast all they want, surveys like this show that its going to be some time before Blu-ray replaces the DVD. If you'd like to read more, Harris Interactive entire press release can be found here.