Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/07/05/sony-ending-production-of-recordable-blu-ray-discs.html
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I wonder if a new format of physical media will arise, or if Blu-ray is the last step of its kind?
Physical media that can be transferred between users? I imagine that’s seen as a much less profitable product than charging each user per copy of the data, or a recurring subscription for cloud access.
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Oh the irony
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From a storage perspective I’m not sure there is any profit or drive to develop anything new. You can purchase a 1TB SSD drive for around $60. Now obviously if you burn tons of Blu-ray discs then you could still fill up 1TB, but I suspect most consumers don’t. For movies or cross compatibility with systems that primarily use Blu-ray they still make sense. Fifteen to twenty five gigabytes for a raw Blu-ray movie still is not great to send via the web. You are going to have a decent number of collectors and purists who want to own the best quality version of a movie, and you are not getting that via a streaming or online purchase.
Realistically the physical Blu-ray format should be retained or improved upon enough that you can enter the market with 4k/8k movies on optical media. With codecs like H.265 or AV1 it should be possible to design a new format that doesn’t require a huge jump in storage capacity to achieve the same or better visual quality as Blu-ray.
The flip side to all this is Apple and iCloud (and the “cloud” in general). Storage is nebulous and is integrated into your system and just works. Pictures, videos, movies are all streamed to the cloud or from a service. Long term I think there will still be demand for physical media in some capacity, but that market will shrink and push prices higher.
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I’ve tried to use BD disks for archival and the whole process has been so finicky and unreliable that I end up with more coasters than usable backup media.
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I think DAT tapes are gonna make a come-back!
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Waiting for the thing where employers make people pare down their resume to fit on 880 GB (rather than dual 4-layer Blu-Ray media at 400 GB?) and require hololayer x9 media. (Which I don’t recall seeing papers on, whatever! Huh.) Otherwise I guess we’ll get cubed media where the drive tries hard to polish a side down into an operant condition for optical computing?
I’m a little curious what the “B2B products” market looks like for recordable blu-ray.
Are there people doing video releases too short-run for stamped disks? Enterprise archival storage arrangements that dared scorn the old gods of LTO?
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