David Caulton Gives Insight Into NPD Numbers

[Aaron Roma]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.zunester.com/2007/04/phd-in-npd.html' target='_blank'>http://www.zunester.com/2007/04/phd-in-npd.html</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>&quot;Their goal is to get all of the major retailers in the US to share their sales figures each month. So when you hear sales numbers from NPD, they&rsquo;re actually the sales figures provided to NPD by the actual retailers &ndash; not some consumer survey, not a sample, but the real thing. I&rsquo;ve spent a lot of time swimming in NPD data for the last few years, and in my experience where I&rsquo;ve been able to compare sales figures from npd per retailer with actual sales figures, they turn out to be scarily accurate.&quot;</em></p><p>David Caulton, aka Zunester, gives a little background information on the NPD &quot;market share&quot; statistics we keep seeing thrown around.&nbsp; David is a Zune team member, and specializes in industry analysis.&nbsp; In particular, David fills us in on what retailers are, and are not included in NPD's numbers.&nbsp; Contrary to popular belief, David asserts that indeed Apples' online and retail sales figures are included by NPD.&nbsp; Check out his article for all the details.</p>

[Adam Krebs]

This is off-topic, but I felt I had to share it.

A lot of people have been wondering when Microsoft will release a halfway-decent converter for the Zune that will support AVI, etc. (and that don't wind up looking terrible, as they do with the registry hack). While we aren't quite there yet, Microsoft's just-released Expression (http://www.microsoft.com/expression/) suite of media tools contains Expression Media Encoder (http://www.microsoft.com/Expression/products/overview.aspx?key=media) as one of its core components, and I gotta say, it ain't half bad. I just happened to be messing around with the program, attempting to manually change values to match the Zune's defaults when I noticed that there's already a profile for "Hardware Device - Zune", set to convert the video into 320x240 Zune-ready format. I tested it out with an AVI rip of a DVD, and it worked quite well. On the default Video Complexity setting (3, with 2-pass conversion), the colors were noticeably duller, with especially muted oranges and reds. The blues, especially those with deep hues were not quite as vivid (this is while watching on the computer, comparing them splitscreen--a nice feature), but overall, it looked much better on the Zune's screen (and took up far less space).

Microsoft offers 180 days of free functionality on the converter via a serial key shown publically on the site. I look forward to seeing what they'll offer next.

[Vincent M Ferrari]

I'm still waiting for David to back up his statement that NPD data includes Apple Retail and Apple online sales. Apparently he's the only one that thinks so, NPD won't confirm it, and he can't seem to get an answer from NPD. There's no press release around the momentous occasion, in his words, "around January 2006."

As of right now, he's wrong. Too many people agree otherwise and it's always been understood that NPD doesn't include that data. Instead, Caulton brought up something counter to the knowledge of everyone else and then has done nothing to back it up.

I call Bravo Sierra.