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Blu-ray discs have been part of the digital media landscape for almost 20 years, but fewer and fewer people have optical drives to use them. As such, Sony doesn’t see the need to keep pumping out recordable Blu-rays. The company’s Japanese arm has announced that it will end manufacturing of recordable Blu-ray, possibly spelling the end of this once popular storage medium.
This announcement comes alongside Sony’s confirmation that it will stop making other, much less popular storage formats, including recordable MiniDiscs, MD-Data, and MiniDV cassettes. This move does not affect the production of retail Blu-ray video discs, which continue to be the standard for high-quality, uncompressed audio and video.
Blu-ray discs first went on sale in 2006, when they did battle with the competing HD DVD standard. Eventually, Sony’s tight relationship with film studios and the release of the Blu-ray-equipped PlayStation 3 helped push Sony over the top to establish Blu-ray as the standard for HD, and later, 4K video. Of course, Netflix changed the game just a couple of years later with its streaming video service. Blu-ray has been on a slow decline ever since.
Sony hinted at changes to its disc operations last year, saying it would “gradually end development and production” of recordable optical disc formats. Today, it’s rare to see an optical drive in a computer. The data we used to read and write using those shiny bits of plastic is now the domain of cloud services and increasingly expansive solid state drives. The latest BDXL writable discs top out at 128GB, which is nothing compared with relatively inexpensive multi-terabyte SSDs. If you need more, you can get spinning hard drives with more than 20TB of storage. And unlike BD-R discs, you can write data to these drives continuously over time.
The PS3’s Blu-ray drive helped Sony’s format win.
Credit: Sony
Still, some data hoarder types might be distressed by the end of Sony’s recordable Blu-ray operation. When stored properly, a Blu-ray disc can safely preserve its data for decades. Other storage formats might not last that long.
For now, fans of recordable Blu-rays will be able to get them. Plenty of unsold discs are floating around, which is expected as more people migrate away from optical technologies. Other firms like TDK and Mitsubishi still manufacture recordable Blu-ray discs, too, but they’ll most likely come to the same conclusion as Sony in the not-too-distant future. Any data hoarders who feel particularly strongly about Blu-ray writing might want to stock up.