Thursday, January 23rd 2025
Sony to Stop Manufacturing Blu-ray Media, Effective February 2025
Sony Japan's Recording Media department has announced the retirement of several physical media formats—most notably Blu-Ray Disc—in a very brief notice addressed to "valued customers." Mid-last year, the Japanese multinational conglomerate revealed that it would stop production of consumer-grade recordable Blu-ray discs (BD-RE and BD-R)—citing a decline in demand and the format's inability to meet "business goals." As pointed out by Tom's Hardware, today's announcement indicates (via machine translation) that both "regular and recorded" product lines are affected—the publication has reached out to Sony for comment/clarification.
Optical media enthusiasts/preservationists will, undoubtedly, be angered by this news—manufacturing activities will cease at some point next month. The corporation's message contains a lot of finality: "thank you for your continued patronage of Sony products. We will end production of all models of Blu-ray Disc media, MiniDiscs for recording, MD data for recording, and MiniDV cassettes as of February 2025. There will be no successor models. We would like to express our sincere gratitude to our many customers for their patronage to date."
Sources:
Sony Japan, Tom's Hardware
Optical media enthusiasts/preservationists will, undoubtedly, be angered by this news—manufacturing activities will cease at some point next month. The corporation's message contains a lot of finality: "thank you for your continued patronage of Sony products. We will end production of all models of Blu-ray Disc media, MiniDiscs for recording, MD data for recording, and MiniDV cassettes as of February 2025. There will be no successor models. We would like to express our sincere gratitude to our many customers for their patronage to date."
22 Comments on Sony to Stop Manufacturing Blu-ray Media, Effective February 2025
Honestly, I've never used, or watched, any context stored on a Blu-ray disk since it requires the Blu-ray compatible media player.
Would I consider a termination of Windows 95 support by Microsoft many years ago as a Disaster? No. Should I be angry about it? No.
Note: For tests of some 32-bit software I use an Acer Aspire Netbook with of Windows 95 ( 1st release ).
M-Disc is still king when it comes to preservation?
Industry: Maybe not.
Sony: We'll pay you big bucks to go "our way"!
Industry: Well ok, then.
Sony: We're #1 because our format was best!!
Industry: I guess you avoided the embarrassment of Betamax all over again.
Sony: Hold my beer.
Also the real loss is the ownership of the games you buy, even though on disc that has been eroding away.
Wikipedia, Blu-ray Manufacturers
Bad news, this is the signal that ownership is one step closer to dead. With the modern DVD/Blu-ray now nearly cheaper than a month of Netflix, or most online media purveyors, it's getting to the point where owning your stuff will be cheaper than streaming again...and Sony bows out from the market because they crapped the bed with PC support. It's great that even today, it dang near takes the illegal act of DRM stripping movies to get them to play in a computer, unless you want a $100 player that does nothing else.
Sigh....I'm conflicted, apathetic, and angry. This feels like blue balled instead of rayed...and that's about as much wit as I'm willing to put forth on something Sony never cared enough about the consumer to provide a decent experience with. It's also the only theoretical source of true 1920x1080 content...but with as ugly as the stuff modern Hollywood puts out maybe it's time for a low-fi restart.
2. Regular Blu-ray is dying anyhow, Ultra HD Blu-ray will still be around for 4K content.
3. Blu-ray was launched in 2006 and turns 20 next year...
Then again, som people still buy movies on DVDs, a format from 1996...
Hopefully other disc makers will be able to make up for this and the format is not yet dead.
Speaking of bluray discs, what will they even use for Playstation games then, since those still come in boxes? Are they just plastic boxes with a download code inside now?
If it's just recordable media, were Sony a big manufacturer?
I haven't been following in recent years, but in the DVD days tier 1 manufacturers/brands were Taiyo Yuden, Verbatim/Mitsubishi, TDK. Tier 2 maybe Ritek, CMC, Moser Baer...
I constantly buy those for my collections.