According to NPD, Mac sales for the month of April in North America were flat year over year. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, who reported the data, said that’s a “neutral to slight positive” data point for Apple, relative to expectations for its Mac business.

Why neutral? Munster’s own forecast calls for worldwide Mac sales for the June quarter to decline about 5 percent year over year. And, last quarter, supply issues hampered sales of Apple’s newer Macs. So if NPD is seeing flat sales for April, that potentially bodes well for the current quarter.

Level Mac sales aren’t great, but they’re obviously better than down Mac sales. And now that Apple is looking to other devices like the iPad to fuel its growth, a planate trend in Mac sales isn’t really cause for much concern. As Apple CEO Tim Cook has repeatedly said, the iPad is now the company’s growth engine, not the Mac.

“With iPad in particular, we have the mother of all opportunities because the Windows market is much, much larger than the Mac market is,” Cook said back in January. “And I think it is clear that it’s already cannibalizing some, and I think there’s a tremendous amount of more opportunity there. As you know I’ve said for two or three years now that I believe the tablet market will be larger than the PC market at some point, and I still believe that. And you can see by the growth in tablets and the pressure on PCs that those lines are beginning to converge.”

And as they continue to do so, declining Mac sales will be less and less cause for concern — as long as the iPad continues to exploit that “mother of all opportunities” to which Cook referred.

The market researcher said Friday that Wii U shipments rose over 40 percent month over month in February — encouraging news were it not for the poor shipment number from which they rose. Wii U shipments are believed to be as low as 57,000 units during January. In other words, Nintendo’s Wii U shipments for the month of February were somewhere in the mid-60,000s. For a console that debuted just a few months ago, that’s just plain lousy. Consider this: Microsoft shipped 302,000 Xbox consoles during the same period.

Suffice to say, Wii U is vastly underperforming expectations. So much so that you’ve got to wonder if Nintendo will meet its already lowered projections for the console. Back in January, the company slashed its sales forecast for the Wii U to four million consoles by the end of March from a prelaunch estimate of 5.5 million. If NPD’s latest numbers are a reasonable indication, even that number may be too high for the company to reach.

Ugly news for Nintendo. If the company’s brand-new Wii U can’t hold its own against Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 — both of which are more than five years old — how will it fare against the forthcoming PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s next-generation Xbox?

Time for a price cut? Maybe, but the company has previously ruled that out.

“With Wii U, we have taken a rather resolute stance in pricing it below its manufacturing cost, so we are not planning to perform a markdown,” Nintendo president Satoru Iwata said in January. “I would like to make this point absolutely clear. We are putting our lessons from Nintendo 3DS to good use, as I have already publicly stated. However, given that it has now become clear that we have not yet fully communicated the value of our product, we will try to do so before the software lineup is enhanced and at the same time work to enrich the software lineup which could make consumers understand the appeal of Wii U.”

Looks like Nintendo still has a lot of work to do communicating that value.

According to NPD data cited by Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, Mac sales rose 31 percent year over year for the month of January. Why? Simple. Said Munster, “We believe the reason for the significant improvement in the sales data is primarily due to Apple catching up with iMac supply.”

When Apple last reported earnings, CEO Tim Cook noted that iMac supplies hadn’t been what the company had hoped. “We left the quarter with significant constraints on the iMac,” Cook said. “And we believe … that our sales would have been materially higher if those constraints weren’t there.”

Cook went on to pledge that Apple would work hard to ramp up iMac production, though he cautioned that supply-demand equilibrium may be something of a moving target in the short term. “On iMac, we are confident that we are going to significantly increase the supply,” he said. “But the demand here is very strong, and we are not certain that we will achieve a supply-demand balance during the quarter.”

On its face, the NPD seems to bear this out. The increase in Mac sales is likely the result of Apple improving production, but as the two-to-three-week/three-to-four-week shipping times on the Apple Store suggest, the company is still having trouble manufacturing enough iMacs to meet demand.

Speaking at the J.P. Morgan Tech Forum at CES Tuesday, Windows Chief Financial Officer Tami Reller revealed that Microsoft has sold 60 million Windows 8 licenses to date. Reller said that number is “roughly” in line with the performance of Windows 7 at the same stage of its rollout three years ago.

Regardless, 60 million is 20 million more licenses than Microsoft had sold by the end of November.

That said, the figure includes upgrade sales, as well as sales to PC manufacturers, so it’s not at all a reflection of sales of Windows 8 devices to consumers and businesses. And until Microsoft discloses hard numbers describing those sales, we’ll have to rely on metrics from market research firms, which are nowhere near as rosy as Microsoft would like. To wit, NPD Group’s announcement last week that sales of Microsoft-powered notebook PCs dropped 11 percent during the five-week holiday-shopping season.

Four out of 10 Americans have connected their TV to the Internet, according to a new Forrester study. If you’re just talking about the whippersnappers in the 18-to-32 age bracket, the number shoots up to 6 in 10.

Forrester credits Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PS3 for most of that; it says 42 percent of connected TV watchers are hooked up via a game console.

If you’re an oldster like me — who remembers the days of rabbit ears, Pong and three broadcast networks — that number seems staggeringly high. And we can attach a few caveats below.

But it’s not the first time we’ve seen stats like these.

Earlier this fall NPD reported that TVs have become the most common screen for Web video-watching. And Netflix says the PS3 often generates more streams per day than PCs do.

So if you’re willing to say these reports are at least directionally correct, it’s a big deal, at least for Netflix, Hulu, YouTube and everyone else who has been waiting on this moment.

If you do want to pick at these numbers, there are a couple ways to do that. For starters, note that the Forrester poll asks people if they have “ever accessed” the Internet on a TV, which is different from regular use. And it’s possible that many gamers are simply counting playing with other gamers as an Internet connection.

Most important is that Forrester’s numbers come from an online survey. And, as Forrester notes in the footnotes to their research, “respondents who participate in online surveys generally have more experience with the Internet and feel more comfortable transacting online.”

In other words: You can probably knock these numbers down a bit if you want to talk about the entire U.S. population. But even then, there’s definitely something here. And maybe that’s old news to everyone but me.

For Microsoft, certainly. But for consumers? Well, that’s an open question. According to one report, Windows 8 isn’t selling nearly as well as Microsoft projected.

Sources A source inside Microsoft tells Windows newshound Paul Thurrott that, internally, Microsoft has been disappointed by Windows 8’s early sales figures, which he theorizes have been hampered by consumer confusion over what the OS really is, and by mediocre hardware. “Microsoft blames the PC makers,” he wrote. “My source cited to me the PC makers’ ‘inability to deliver,’ a damning indictment that I think nicely explains why the firm felt it needed to start making its own PC and device hardware.”

We’ve heard similar rumblings. Indeed, according to NPD Group vice president Stephen Baker, retail sales of Windows 8 in the U.S. haven’t been as strong as those of its predecessor, Windows 7.

“I would say that Win 8 has had a faster ramp than Win 7 since launch, but Win 7 had a much stronger launch,” Baker told AllThingsD. “When Win 7 was released the retail channel was fairly clean with few Vista systems remaining. This year, there was a lot of older inventory that needed to sell through before Win 8 product could really start to sell. That is slowly fixing itself as Win 8 keeps growing each week. But it started off with a much weaker share of volume than Win 7 did.”

So consumers may be a bit more hesitant to make the switch to Windows 8 than they have to previous iterations of the OS, at least initially. But that may change as PC retailers roll over older inventory to new Windows 8 machines.

And, in the end, attempting to gauge Windows 8’s popularity at this point is obviously premature, even if sales haven’t met Microsoft’s internal projections. As Harry McCracken notes over at Time, Windows 8 is such a radical departure from what we’ve long understood to be the Windows OS that no one should be all that surprised that consumers are a bit more tentative about upgrading to it.

Microsoft declined comment on Windows 8 sales.

Getting Web video off your PC and onto your plasma screen used to be a niche activity. No more: Consumer-tracking service NPD says TV sets are now the most popular way to watch streaming video.

NPD says 45 percent of consumers report that TV is now their primary Web video screen, up from 33 percent last year. It basically swapped places with the PC, which used to account for 48 percent of viewing but now represents 31 percent.*

This is a story about devices: NPD figures that 10 percent of homes now have at least one Internet-enabled TV (though I bet that only a minority of them are actually plugged into the Web), and we’re seeing a steady increase in the use of Web-video peripherals, like Blu-ray players, Apple TVs and Microsoft Xbox 360s.

And it’s also about content: NPD says the most popular service for viewing Web content on TV is Netflix, with 40 percent of connected TV watchers using the service.

Here’s NPD’s general screen breakdown by device. Curious that “mobile” doesn’t show up as a category; then again, maybe mobile is always a third choice compared to bigger screens. Also odd that the iPad and other tablets don’t break 1 percent.

And here’s NPD’s summary of how Web-to-TV viewers get their stuff on the big screen:

Percentage of device owners that use the device to acquire online content (video, music, games)

• 43 percent connected TVs
• 47 percent VG consoles (Wii, Xbox 360, PS3)
• 62 percent streaming media players (Roku, Boxee, Apple TV)
• 38 percent computers with direct wired connection to TV
• 21 percent of BD players

* I’m assuming that mobile accounts for most everything else, but am waiting for confirmation. Update: Nope! See above.

According to the latest data from NPD, U.S. Mac sales grew 1 percent year over year for the last month of the June quarter, after falling 13 percent in April and 23 percent in May.

Now, for the full quarter, Mac sales are still down 10 percent from the same period a year ago — according to NPD. But the fact that they’ve recovered from that 23 percent decline in May is a positive sign as we head into fall and the uptick in consumer spending that it heralds.

“We believe the momentum from the June Mac refresh will carry into the September quarter,” said Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, who published NPD’s sales data in a research note. “While the up 1 percent is not tremendous growth, we believe that the refreshed Macs will enable Apple to sustain a better growth profile in the U.S. through the back-to-school season.”

Munster, who expects Mac growth of 5 percent for the June quarter, is calling for Apple to ship 4.1 million Macs — in line with Street consensus. He sees iPhone shipments of 28 million to 29 million units last quarter, ahead of the 25- to 27-million-unit consensus, and iPad shipments of 16 million units, which is in line with the Street’s expectations.

Apple reports earnings on Tuesday, July 24.

One example is Electronic Arts, which has eliminated 42 game franchises over the past two years, to focus on 25 of its best titles. Now there’s at least one data point that says the industrywide practice is starting to pay off.

In May, there were 27 percent fewer new game introductions, but the new console, portable and PC titles that did launch generated 188 percent more unit sales than they did a year ago, and 31 percent more dollars, according to NPD’s monthly game report.

“So, while there were fewer new item introductions this May, they collectively generated more unit and dollar sales,” said Anita Frazier, NPD Group’s videogame industry analyst.

One thing that helped drive positive results in May was the huge success of Activision Blizzard’s Diablo III for the PC.

NPD’s monthly game report primarily tracks new sales of hardware, software and accessories that occur at retail — in other words, it does not take into account game sales that happen electronically. Frazier estimates that the physical retail channel now only represents 50 percent to 60 percent of the total consumer spend on games.

But Frazier estimates that in May consumers also spent $155 million on used games and rentals, and $420 million on digital sales, including subscriptions, mobile apps, social games and downloadable content.

In all, she estimates that consumers spent $1.17 billion on both physical and digital games in May.

According to NPD, Apple shipped 17.2 million mobile PCs* worldwide during the first quarter of 2012, enough to capture a 22.5 percent share of the market — more than double that of its closest rival, Hewlett-Packard. During the same period, HP shipped just 8.9 million mobile PCs for an 11.6 percent market share.

How did Apple manage to dominate PC leader HP in the mobile PC market? The iPad.

Of the 17.2 million “mobile PCs” Apple shipped, 13.6 million were iPads. And in that particular segment of the market — tablets — Apple’s domination is unrelenting. In the first quarter, Apple claimed a stunning 62.8 percent share of the tablet market, dwarfing every single one of its rivals. Samsung, its next closest rival, shipped just 1.6 million tablets during the quarter, for a share of 7.5 percent. Amazon followed with 900,000 tablets shipped and a 4 percent share. Bringing up the rear: Research In Motion and Asus, which sold 500,000 tablets each, for a 2.3 percent market share.

*NPD defines mobile PCs as tablets and laptops.

That’s according to the latest data from the NPD Group’s retail tracking service. Sales of 3-D TVs in the U.S. grew 74 percent in units over last year, with 3-D TVs accounting for 11 percent of all flat-panel sales in the first quarter of 2012, the report says.

But despite the growth in sales, and the fact that some consumers are wowed by 3-D demos, “just 14 percent of consumers … say 3D is a ‘must have’ feature while 68 percent say it’s a ‘nice feature to have they may use in the future.’”

The obstacles to greater 3-D penetration are the usual suspects, NPD analyst Ben Arnold says. The overwhelming majority of consumers consider 3-D glasses a drawback to the technology, with glasses-free 3-D still far from being perfected; 14 percent say the lack of 3-D content is a deterrent (though that reason is weakening, as more content creators put out 3-D programs).

Cost is also a factor when it comes to newer, souped-up TVs. NPD says the average prices of 3-D TVs in April were 33 percent lower compared to April 2010, but a recent report from IHS iSuppli says that average prices of 3-D LCD TVs actually crept up a teeny bit from December 2011 to April of this year, to $2,492.

So why buy a 3-D TV if you’re not going to use it for 3-D? Well, for one thing, as noted here, “3-D” has been shifting from the main selling point in TV marketing schemes to an add-on feature that happens to be included in high-tech TV sets, so some consumers are buying 3-D-equipped TVs even if they’ve not totally bought into the tech.

And the underutilization of fancy TVs isn’t really a new thing: Turns out that 3-D engagement levels might be in line with some of the data we’ve seen surrounding “smart” TVs, or Internet-connected TVs. Despite the fact that Internet connectivity is often cited as an important factor for consumers making TV purchases, TechNewsDaily reported earlier this year that only half of all people who own Internet-ready TVs have actually gone online through their TVs.

(Image courtesy of Salminari on Flickr; thought bubble courtesy of AllThingsD)

That’s the latest forecast from NPD DisplaySearch, which anticipates a massive uptick in tablet adoption over the next few years, one that will ultimately vault the device’s market share over the PC’s. The research outfit figures tablet shipments will grow from 81.6 million units in 2011 to 184.2 million in 2013 — significantly more than the 168.9 million NPD had originally predicted.

And by 2017, NPD expects them to hit 424.9 million units, exceeding notebook PC shipments — for the second year in a row.

The key drivers of that explosive growth: The tablet’s rapidly evolving feature set, and increased investments in the tablet supply chain, as consumer interest in other device categories cools.

“So far in this relatively young product category, the tablet PC market has been dominated by Apple and has tended to include a number of competing products that are similarly configured to the iPad,” says NPD DisplaySearch’s Richard Shim. “However, as the market matures and competitors become better attuned to consumer preferences and find opportunities to break new ground, we expect the landscape to change dramatically, giving consumers more choices, which will drive demand for more devices.”

More choices in hardware, perhaps. But not so much in operating systems.

Over the next five years, NPD sees the tablet market dominated by Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, with some small inroads made by Microsoft’s Windows 8 and Windows RT. By 2017, the firm sees iOS with a 50.9 percent share of the market, Android with a 40.5 percent share, and Windows with a 7.5 percent share.

More than a quarter of current iPad owners say the tablet is the first Apple product they’ve purchased, according to a new survey from the NPD Group. “iPad sales are growing much faster than any other Apple product has this soon after launch,” says NPD’s Ben Arnold. “In fact, one-in-five Apple owner households has one — nearly equivalent to the number that own an Apple computer.”

So the iPad is Apple’s newest ambassador? Not all that big of a surprise considering how well the device has been selling. Apple sold 11.8 million iPads during its most recent quarter — that’s more than double the number it sold last year. More to the point, the newest model was only actually shipping during the last three weeks or so of the quarter. And, as Apple CEO Tim Cook noted during the company’s Tuesday earnings call, iPad supply was constrained at that time.

And sales to date have been fantastic.

“Just two years after we shipped the initial iPad, we’ve sold 67 million,” Cook said Tuesday. “To put that in some context, it took us 24 years to sell that many Macs, and five years for that many iPods, and over three years for that many iPhones, and we were extremely happy with the trajectory on all of those products.”

So is it any surprise that newcomers to the Apple brand are increasingly being introduced to it by the iPad?

According to NPD, 33 percent of U.S. households — or 37 million — currently own Apple products. How large will that percentage be a year from now given the iPad’s sales trend?

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster reports that NPD’s data, which counts only U.S. sales, implies that Mac sales for the March quarter ended down 5 percent year over year. And if that proves to be the case, Apple could potentially miss its Mac number when it posts financials next Tuesday. Caveat: Last quarter, Apple beat NPD data by 14 percentage points — something to keep in mind while mulling Munster’s assertion.

Anyway … the Street is looking for worldwide Mac sales of 4.5 million; Munster figures Apple likely sold less than that — somewhere between 4.1 million to 4.4 million, with sales slowed by a core MacBook Pro and iMac lineup that hasn’t been refreshed in more than a year. Those two product lines alone likely account for about 50 percent of Mac sales, so it’s certainly conceivable that diminishing consumer interest in them might affect Apple’s sales numbers.

But is this really anything to worry about?

Munster himself acknowledges that strong iPhone and iPad sales will more than offset any Mac softness. He still expects the company to beat consensus EPS and revenue estimates and, like many Apple watchers, he sees new Macs headed into the pipeline soon, following on the heels of Intel’s new Ivy Bridge processors. Said Munster, “We believe that MacBook, iMac, and potentially MacBook Air, lines could all be refreshed during the June quarter, which we believe would result in a reacceleration of Mac sales.”

Despite some industry gains from January to February, overall sales totaled $1.06 million last month, down from $1.33 billion year over year; software sales fell 23 percent to $464 million, and hardware sales dropped 18 percent to $381.4 million.

February’s best-selling software title was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, from Activision Blizzard.

While most hardware platforms posted declines year over year, “all current-generation platforms improved sales over January 2012 by more than 50 percent,” NPD said in a note.

A consistent bright spot has been the Microsoft Xbox, which was the best-selling hardware platform for the seventh month in a row. Some 426,000 Xbox units were sold in February, marking the 12th consecutive month Xbox has held more than 40 percent of the current-generation console market share.

And all eyes were on the Sony PlayStation Vita handheld gaming device, which came to market in late February. Only four days of retail sales for the PS Vita were included in this reporting period, but the device gave overall hardware unit sales a month-over-month boost. Not including the PS Vita, hardware unit sales increased by 62 percent over January, NPD said; with PS Vita sales included, the increase was 87 percent.

“More than 1.2 million PS Vita units have been sold globally since launch,” Patrick Seybold, senior director of communications at Sony Computer Entertainment America, said in a statement. “Customer satisfaction rates are very high and momentum will continue as gamers get their hands on a deep lineup of blockbuster titles that take advantage of PS Vita’s unique features, including cross-platform play with the PlayStation 3.”

In January, the videogame industry saw a double-digit decline in physical software sales, as my colleague Tricia Duryee reports, following a number of noteworthy game launches ahead of the holiday season.

That data point comes from NPD, which says 78 million Americans bought music in 2011, up 2 percent from 2010. And that’s the second consecutive year the number has bumped up.

Since CD sales continue to decline, the uptick here comes from the digital side, just like people have been predicting since … forever. NPD says 45 million people bought digital downloads at Apple’s iTunes and Amazon, up 14 percent from 2010.

Given that it’s easier than ever to listen to free music, legally, via streaming options like Pandora and Spotify, the fact that paid downloads are up is a little counterintuitive.

But that’s always been part of the streaming music service pitch to the big labels: Let us give away your stuff, and we’ll help increase demand — just like radio used to do.

We’re starting to hear murmurs from the labels that this is actually how it’s working in the real world, too. Again, too early to tell if it’s a long-term trend, or perhaps just an Adele-inspired bump. But near-term good news is still much better than years of decline.

Zynga was up 42 cents, or almost 5 percent today, to close at $8.87 a share.

That’s a huge reversal from earlier this week when the stock nosedived to an all-time low. Meanwhile, none of the traditional game makers were having such a good day.

Electronic Arts closed down $1.47, or 7.5 percent, to $18.04 a share; THQ fell 7 percent to 66 cents a share; Take-Two Interactive fell .5 percent to $14.50 a share; and industry-leading Activision Blizzard slipped 2.5 percent $12.24 a share. GameStop also traded lower, finishing off the day down 2.8 percent to $23.51 a share.

The game makers were universally feeling the impact of an NPD Group report that revealed yesterday that videogame software sales fell 8 percent in December compared to the same month in 2010. When including hardware and accessories, like game cards, the entire industry contracted by 21 percent year over year.

Potentially, investors were betting that if the traditional game-makers weren’t fairing well, then Zynga was a good bet. The leading Facebook game-maker operates purely online and on mobile, so it potentially would be more isolated from the retail and packaged goods sectors.

The old guard vs. new guard battle also played out on the front lines yesterday.

EA was dealt an additional blow when Zynga announced it had hired away Barry Cottle, head of Electronic Arts’ Interactive division. Cottle, who was in charge of the company’s digital strategy, including social and mobile games, was EA’s biggest weapon in fighting Zynga’s dominance on Facebook and had led EA’s rise on mobile.

But EA’s loss was Zynga’s gain.

The social games leader appointed Cottle to the position of EVP of business and corporate development in charge of new global partnerships, acquisitions and other development roles.

Even the smallest of businesses are considering tablets, though only 54 percent of those with fewer than 50 employees are planning on buying a tablet, compared with 73 percent of all businesses with fewer than 1,000 workers. That last figure is up five percentage points from a quarter earlier, NPD said.

On average, the small businesses surveyed plan to spend around $21,000 on tablets in the coming year, though that amount varies greatly based on the size of the firm.

“Businesses of all sizes appear to be determined to capitalize on the tablet phenomenon,” NPD analyst Stephen Baker said in a statement. “The iPad, just as it is in the consumer market, is synonymous for ‘tablet’ in the business market.”

New research from NPD finds that smartphones are now responsible for more than a quarter of the photos and videos people take in the U.S. About 27 percent of photographs taken in 2011 were captured by smartphones, up from 17 percent last year. Meanwhile, about 44 percent were taken with single-purpose cameras. That’s down from 52 percent in 2010. Standard cellphones, camcorders, webcams and tablets account for the remainder.

So, a significant decline, and one indicative of a trend that’s been emerging for years now: The smartphone as “good enough” camera. With our phones packing increasingly better cameras and improved optics, the reasons for carrying a dedicated point-and-shoot are growing fewer — unless you’re a professional photographer or a hobbyist. And that’s having a deleterious effect on the camera market. According to NPD’s Retail Tracking Service, the point-and-shoot camera market declined 17 percent in units and 18 percent in dollars for the first 11 months of 2011.

The NPD Group released a new report today that calculated the amount of money Americans are spending on games from the nontraditional market. That includes a lot of digital content, such as subscriptions, digital downloads, social games and mobile games, but also used games and rentals.

In the third quarter, it found that the amount spent on that “other content” totaled $1.64 billion.

While significant, NPD said it wasn’t enough to offset lower revenue from the traditional game market. NPD defines the traditional market as packaged goods sold at retail. In the third quarter, that totaled $1.3 billion.

“New physical retail sales had a rough third quarter,” said Anita Frazier, an analyst with NPD. “Increases in sales from some of these other monetization methods, and full game and add-on digital downloads in particular, only partially offset the decline see in the new physical retail channel.”

She said the overall market, including hardware, totaled $4.2 billion, down 11 percent compared to the same period a year ago.

For companies like Electronic Arts, which is investing heavily in mobile and social games and is placing big bets on online content, like today’s release of Star Wars: The Old Republic, the results of these monthly and quarterly reports are unrepresentative of the trends they are seeing.

“Everything is growing. If you look at the total interactive business, it’s a $50 billion market internationally, and that’s up double digits. That’s where we play,” said EA’s President of Labels Frank Gibeau. “We find it frustrating because it doesn’t tell the whole picture.”

In the second quarter, EA’s digital revenue, which includes downloadable console content, mobile and social — was up 30 percent year over year.

Even a company like Activision, which has been slower to develop games on Facebook and mobile, said that during the second quarter, revenue from digital channels — mostly downloadable content — increased 27 percent year ove year, and accounted for 37 percent of the company’s total net revenue.

For all-digital companies, like Zynga, which went public last week to raise $1 billion, its impact hardly seems to register.

“I think that ultimately we are an interactive entertainment company, not a packaged goods company,” Gibeau said. “We are platform and channel agnostic. The physical channel is a great channel and it’s going to be around longer than people think. … We are fine with that model, but then, when you bring that game home, you should be able to connect to the larger online world.”

“This November marks the best November on record for sales of new physical content,” said NPD Group’s Anita Frazier.

Activision said within the first five days of sales, Call of Duty shattered all previous entertainment records, grossing more than $775 million. In fact, its first month of sales beat the game’s predecessor by about 7 percent, NPD added.

In NPD’s report released today, it analyzed videogame sales for November, taking into account sales made at retail across both hardware and software. It excludes the sale of digital content, like mobile games and downloadable content.

In November, NPD said software sales totaled $1.7 billion, jumping 15 percent from $1.45 billion in the same month last year. Hardware sales weren’t so lucky, falling 9 percent to $982 million from $1.1 billion in November 2010.

The second-most popular title during the month was Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for Xbox, PlayStation and the PC. “In one month, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is just about half a million units shy of matching Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion in lifetime sales. Its first month performance was a five-fold increase over Oblivion’s first month sales,” Frazier said.

The rest of the titles in the top 10 are:

• Battlefield 3, Electronic Arts
• Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, Ubisoft
• Just Dance, Ubisoft
• Madden NFL 12, Electronic Arts
• Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception, Sony
• Saints Row: The Third, THQ
• The Legend of Zelda: SkywardSword, Nintendo
• Batman: Arkham City, Warner Bros. Interactive

And things are actually worse than that. Topping the list compiled by NPD was Hewlett-Packard, which only sold that many tablets thanks to a billion dollar fire sale.

HP accounted for 17 percent of those tablets, just ahead of Samsung, which had 16 percent of the market, followed by Asus, Motorola and Acer, which each had around a 9 or 10 percent share.

Of course, that means things were even more dismal for the other companies vying for tablet share, a list that includes HTC, Toshiba, Research In Motion and Dell, to name just a few.

NPD analyst Stephen Baker sees the very small glass as half full.

“If you look at the tablet market without Apple there are a number of high-profile brands vying for that number two spot,” Baker said in a statement, adding that three quarters of those who bought a tablet were not even considering an iPad, which he said is “an indication that a large group of consumers are looking for alternatives, and an opportunity for the rest of the market to grow their business.”

And of course, things are getting more interesting thanks to Amazon and its Kindle Fire.

But Baker also notes that the market is awfully crowded and there is not much left to go around.

That’s a 20 percent increase over the first half of the year. And, as you can see from the chart below, the spike in sales occurred with the July launch of the new hardware and has been trending upward ever since. So in four months the Air has gone from less than 10 percent of Apple’s notebook business to nearly a third of it. How much will it comprise by 2012?

Close to 50 percent? That might seem like a stretch, though some analysts have been forecasting it for a while. Back in July, Deutsche Bank’s Chris Whitmore predicted that sales of the Air could ramp to as high as 1.5 million per quarter, which is indeed about half of Apple’s MacBook business. Obviously, they’ve still got a way to go. But we haven’t yet hit the holiday consumer binge. And 2012 could bring with it a new 15-inch Air, destined to drive sales of the machine higher still …