Looks like that format war victory is starting to show real results. Home Media Magazine reports sales of Blu-Ray discs have shot up 351 percent from January to March of this year.

This in turn saw consumer spending on home entertainment increase by one percent since the same time last year. Seems small? Not really, that one percent is worth $5.5 billion. This is also the first real rise in two years.

Video sales rose 2.3 percent while rentals decreased by 1.6.

Bernstein Research predicts one quarter of US households will own a Blu-Ray player inside three years, and it notes the process is going slower than for that of DVD.