In addition to a wealth of impressive title announcements, the Blu-ray association adopted the sternest language I’ve yet heard in offering some very compelling sales numbers and statistics to state its case that Blu-ray will be the decisive winner of the format war. According to the BDA’s stats, the war is already over in Japan with Blu-ray scoring 96% of the high-definition player market there.

Pioneer’s Andy Parsons indicated that victory in the US will follow sooner rather than later. The BDA believes people will gravitate to the format that has the movies they want, and with five significant Hollywood studios exclusively supporting Blu-ray the BDA believes its content advantage insurmountable. And indeed, if you’re backing an HD format, do you want to be on the opposite side of Pixar?

To back that claim the BDA claims it now already has more titles available than HD DVD and that weekly unit sales have now tipped in Blu-ray’s favor. Also shown were the top 20 selling DVD titles of 2006. 19 of the 20 were from Blu-ray studios, with only one title from an exclusive to HD DVD studio, and of those 19 BD studio titles several were from BD exclusive studios.

Since the PS3 was released in mid-November BD sales have climbed 700%, and the BDA pointed of the BD players currently in the market, only Samsung’s BD-P1000 and the PS3 were available more than six or eight weeks ago. In other words, BD claims it is already offering and selling more titles even though the format didn’t fully launch until the last two months of ‘06 .

As I reported in an earlier Blog, Sony is claiming that there are over one million PS3s in North America right now. Sony has polled over 10,000 PS3 owners and over 80% claim they will buy movies on Blu-ray, with over 75% claming the PS3 will be the primary movie playing device in the household. This is in answer to those claiming that it’s not known whether PS3 owners are BD adopters in addition to gamers, or whether the gaming console will be in the kid’s bedroom or the living room.

Moving ahead with a forecast, an executive from Fox said its forecast is that weekly BD software sales will triple that of HD DVD by the end of the first quarter of 2007. Time will tell if Blu-ray walks the walk, but the BDA is certainly talking the talk.