News Sony kills off Blu-ray and optical disks for consumer market — business-to-business production to continue until unprofitable

[Admin]

Sony will stop making recordable Blu-ray for consumers, but retains production for corporate customers and Hollywood.

Sony kills off Blu-ray and optical disks for consumer market — business-to-business production to continue until unprofitable : Read more

 

[hotaru251]

As someone who loves physical media...this sucks as just another step closer to a future where you literally own nothing just rent it.

 

[DS426]

Saying HDDs and SSDs last an average of five years is a little misleading; I'm pretty sure most in real-world use get closer to 7-8 years. That said, definitely a loss to long-term archival storage capabilities as data has to be refreshed on H/SDDs occasionally, so even a low-power-on-hours drive poses challenges. Then again, even finding a BD reader (and CD and DVD for those archival discs as well) will probably become challenging in 30+ years or incredibly expensive anyways, so I'm hesitant to even use that for long-term data archiving.

 

[DavidMV]

As someone who loves physical media...this sucks as just another step closer to a future where you literally own nothing just rent it.

As someone how buys everything on Blu-Ray or 4K and rips them onto a NAS... I really don't think we need discs anymore. Just let me buy and download the movies like I can for music. I'll take care of the backup. The disc is just an annoying step for me at this point.

If you absolutely must have something physical, they should just put movies on USB drives and set them as read only. Erasing and writing is what wears out flash memory.

 

[TechyIT223]

Who didn't see this would be coming?

 

[BC_T]

Very strange article that bizarrely claims people need to stock up on Blu-ray blanks now as if Sony is/was the only manufacturer of such discs. The reality is that Sony "phased out" their recordable Blu-ray disc production, at least for consumers, a very long time ago. Anything in Sony-branded packaging from the past 10 or so years was actually another manufacturer's product. The last remaining manufacturer of Blu-ray recordable discs in Japan was Panasonic until they left the market around two years ago.

Ritek, CMC (which now owns Verbatim brand) and a few others have been the market leaders for many years under their own brand names and under other names. There's no indication that they intend to cease production, though their inferior quality control compared to manufacturers in Japan may very well slip even further over time making archival-grade BD-Rs a rarity.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

It's really not that surprising. With the spread of high speed and broadband internet and the advent of really inexpensive cloud storage the size of multiple BD-R's, as well as the growth of fast LTE and 5G coverage with high data limits combined with personal cloud storage options, the number of people who would need write-once optical storage are quite limited, given the cost of BD-Rs ($1-$2 per 25GB disk) as well as the cost of the writer itself. As for local backups, external hard drives, the ones that are disconnected and are properly stored, will last much longer than 3 years.

 

[FoxtrotMichael-1]

As someone how buys everything on Blu-Ray or 4K and rips them onto a NAS... I really don't think we need discs anymore. Just let me buy and download the movies like I can for music. I'll take care of the backup. The disc is just an annoying step for me at this point.

If you absolutely must have something physical, they should just put movies on USB drives and set them as read only. Erasing and writing is what wears out flash memory.

I do the same, but if you think they're going to sell you digital copies of movies once Blu-Ray is dead, I have news for you: they won't. They don't even want you to be able to make digital copies of your Blu-Rays, which is why they come full of DRM and we had to use something like RedFox AnyDVD to copy them. RedFox has gone down, and I'm not entirely sure the software even works anymore. Without physical media you won't be allowed to own anything.

 

[NedSmelly]

I don’t recall Blu-ray ever reaching critical mass as a consumer data storage medium anyway. I remember building a system in 2010 with a Blu-ray drive but everyone else I knew only had DVD/CD drives, so I ended up burning DVDs anyway to share files. The blank media was also quite expensive. Consumer USB flash drives also came out around the same time, which made the whole disc-burning thing redundant.

 

[DavidMV]

I do the same, but if you think they're going to sell you digital copies of movies once Blu-Ray is dead, I have news for you: they won't. They don't even want you to be able to make digital copies of your Blu-Rays, which is why they come full of DRM and we had to use something like RedFox AnyDVD to copy them. RedFox has gone down, and I'm not entirely sure the software even works anymore. Without physical media you won't be allowed to own anything.

I use MakeMKV, it works perfect on everything and is still being updated. The only slight complication is for 4K UHD discs you have to use certain makes and models of Blu-Ray drives and you need to change the firmware in them. It isn't hard to find a good drive though. Even ones with the firmware already updated are on eBay. regular Blu-rays and DVDs require nothing special.

MakeMKV doesn't preserve the Java menus though (at least not how I use it)... but you get all the media including all the audio tracks and subtitle tracks. Ads before the movie just come out as different MKV files and you can delete them. All the extras are in separate MKV files.

 

[USAFRet]

I don’t recall Blu-ray ever reaching critical mass as a consumer data storage medium anyway.

It didn't.

DVD was 'good enough'. Especially when conflated with whatever TV you had.

"What, I need a new TV, AND need to buy that movie again? No thanks"

 

[fireaza]

I do the same, but if you think they're going to sell you digital copies of movies once Blu-Ray is dead, I have news for you: they won't. They don't even want you to be able to make digital copies of your Blu-Rays, which is why they come full of DRM and we had to use something like RedFox AnyDVD to copy them. RedFox has gone down, and I'm not entirely sure the software even works anymore. Without physical media you won't be allowed to own anything.

"DVDFab Passkey for Blu-ray" works fine for me. It's still getting updates too.

Even without physical media, you'll still be able to "own" things because ripping will continue to exist. It doesn't matter that, say, the Fallout TV series is streaming-only, because AnyStream is a thing.

 

[Pemalite]

If you absolutely must have something physical, they should just put movies on USB drives and set them as read only. Erasing and writing is what wears out flash memory.

NAND is garbage for archival storage and will lose it's data without being subjected to electrical charge in a process known as "bit flip".

 

[USAFRet]

NAND is garbage for archival storage and will lose it's data without being subjected to electrical charge in a process known as "bit flip".

What you write has nothing to do with what he wrote.

 

[Joseph_138]

After they wasted millions to kill off HD DVD, just when streaming was pushing optical media out of the market, entirely. I guess there's no reason to buy game consoles anymore, if there won't be optical media anymore. I refuse to stream, or go digital only.

 

[Joseph_138]

I don’t recall Blu-ray ever reaching critical mass as a consumer data storage medium anyway. I remember building a system in 2010 with a Blu-ray drive but everyone else I knew only had DVD/CD drives, so I ended up burning DVDs anyway to share files. The blank media was also quite expensive. Consumer USB flash drives also came out around the same time, which made the whole disc-burning thing redundant.

It never did. Streaming was already taking over when Sony was battling Toshiba for the optical market. They spent millions to kill off HD DVD, only to be killed by streaming.

 

[Sleepy_Hollowed]

As someone how buys everything on Blu-Ray or 4K and rips them onto a NAS... I really don't think we need discs anymore. Just let me buy and download the movies like I can for music. I'll take care of the backup. The disc is just an annoying step for me at this point.

If you absolutely must have something physical, they should just put movies on USB drives and set them as read only. Erasing and writing is what wears out flash memory.

Please tell us how laws and commercial hardware protections on media will allow you to own anything legally.

That's on top of closed standards where you can't reverse-engineer formats for video until perhaps decades later if that, or never if the company goes under.

You're not thinking this through.

 

[DavidMV]

Please tell us how laws and commercial hardware protections on media will allow you to own anything legally.

That's on top of closed standards where you can't reverse-engineer formats for video until perhaps decades later if that, or never if the company goes under.

You're not thinking this through.

Just like how I can buy MP3 and FLAC files without issue. Just needs someone big to push it like how Apple did with iTunes.

What video codec or container file format are you talking about that doesn't have the information available on how to decode it?

 

[mmp09]

For last 10-12 years, I have been putting off the decision to buy Blu-Ray DVD player/writer. I just visit Amazon to view the product available but did not actually feel like buying it.

 

[t3t4]

So in other words, they are killing off a tried and true storage media that everybody can own and use, in favor of some cloud based storage crap that nobody can own and only use if they continually pay for it!

I don't want anything to do with this download "digital" bit stripped movie garbage!
I want the real "digital" version that is only available on optical media, that I can actually hold in my hand, and own!
That better not change in my lifetime!

 

[SilverStar Heggisist]

As someone how buys everything on Blu-Ray or 4K and rips them onto a NAS... I really don't think we need discs anymore. Just let me buy and download the movies like I can for music. I'll take care of the backup. The disc is just an annoying step for me at this point.

If you absolutely must have something physical, they should just put movies on USB drives and set them as read only. Erasing and writing is what wears out flash memory.

Letting it sit without rewriting too long also causes file corruption from what I've seen. I've a few drives that were written to once, lost for about a decade and now not only are they unreadable, but they can't even be formatted to use. I've yet to loose data off a disk.

Cloud isn't a viable secure backup. Cloud is just your stuff on someone else's computer. You know what's more secure then encryption? Not having that data on someone else's computer in the first place.

 

[SilverStar Heggisist]

So in other words, they are killing off a tried and true storage media that everybody can own and use, in favor of some cloud based storage crap that nobody can own and only use if they continually pay for it!

I don't want anything to do with this download "digital" bit stripped movie garbage!
I want the real "digital" version that is only available on optical media, that I can actually hold in my hand, and own!
That better not change in my lifetime!

"You will own nothing and be happy"