Last week, Sony announced that it would stop producing writable Blu-ray discs. While this isn’t exactly devastating news for fans of physical media, it is certainly disappointing.
The first hint that Sony’s recordable disc business was dying was a rumor about layoffs at the company’s optical media plant that recently spread on the Internet. The rumor was eventually confirmed by Japanese AV port Last week, Tom’s Hardware later chose Top News Last week it was translated into English, causing a slight panic about how it would affect Blu-Ray fans’ collecting habits.
While the exact date and time when the discs in question will become unavailable is unknown, what is known is that their days are numbered.
Fortunately, Sony has no plans to discontinue its studio Blu-Ray disc releases at this time. These discs will remain available for the foreseeable future. “We will continue to sell B2B products by pre-manufacturing them, and for consumer products, we will determine a specific end date in the future through discussions with distribution partners such as retailers, but we will continue to sell them for now,” the company told AV Watch.
However, Sony still made a big mistake by withdrawing from the CD-R market. You will now have less choice to archive the show or movie you want to watch. There has been a wave of renewed interest In physical media, where streams are scattered in a million directions, and users have realized that they don’t really own their digital purchases, the ability to make copies of your library is essential to preserving it. And frankly, Blu-Ray is just a great storage format.
Gizmodo has reached out to Sony for more information on its decision to phase out writable discs and will update this story when it hears back.
“Writer. Friendly troublemaker. Lifelong food junkie. Professional beer evangelist.”