Last week, Sony broke the news that it is putting the kibosh on its writeable Blu-Ray disc business. While that’s not catastrophic news for physical media fans, it’s certainly disappointing.
The first hint about the death of Sony’s recordable discs business was a rumor about layoffs at the company’s optical media plant that recently circulated the web. That rumor was ultimately confirmed by Japanese outlet AV Watch last week. Tom’s Hardware subsequently picked up the news last week and translated it into English, setting off a minor panic about what impact this could have on Blu-Ray fans’ collecting habits.
While the exact date and time when the discs in question will become unavailable isn’t known, what is known is that their days are numbered.
Thankfully, Sony does not currently have plans to kill Blu-Ray releases from studios. Those discs will continue to be available for the foreseeable future. “We will continue to sell B2B products by making them in advance, and for consumer products, we will decide on the specific end date in the future through discussions with distribution partners such as mass retailers, but we will continue to sell them for the time being,” the company told AV Watch.
That said, Sony is still messing up by getting out of the writeable disc business. You’ll now have one less option for archiving that show or movie you want to watch. There’s been a wave of renewed interest in physical media as streaming splinters in a million directions and users have realized they don’t really own their digital purchases. The ability to create copies of your library is essential to preservation. And honestly, Blu-Ray is just a great storage format.
Gizmodo reached out to Sony for more information about its decision to phase out writeable discs and will update this story when it responds.
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