Sony announced that the company is officially halting the production of recordable Blu-ray, MiniDisc and MD Data disc media as well as MiniDV cassettes. It's another step in the slow decline of physical media as Sony said that production of the optical media will end in February this year.
"There will be no successor models," the company said in a press release, noting that production is ending due to poor sales. Currently, Sony offers a range of options from 25GB to 128GB storage capacity in both R (write once) and RE (write multiple times).
To be clear, this is not about the Blu-Ray discs used for movies and PS5 games.
Other companies like Verbatim are still producing recordable Blu-ray discs for those seeking recordable Blu-ray discs. On the other hand, MiniDiscs may be seeing their last days as Sony is one of the few companies producing them, if not the only one.
Blu-Ray won the Betamax/VHS war against HDDVDs when the formats were introduced (largely thanks to pornography, as it goes with many things in tech). Since then, the appeal of Blu-Ray has slowly been chipped away due to streaming services, cloud storage and cheap memory.
However, physical media has seen a bit of a resurgence has more savvy consumers have noticed that the licensing protocol of digital purchases means we don't actually own our purchases. Streaming services can be fickle with dumping or removing shows and movies at their whims.
Reportedly, MIniDisc has seen a resurgence among audiophiles partly due to the tactility of the media and improved audio. It also supports live recording and can be found in professional studios since a lot of music and audio is archived in that format.
All four formats have existed for decades, with Blu-Ray being the youngest, launching in 2002. MiniDV cassettes, mostly used in video production, debuted in 1995. MiniDisc and MD Data arrvied in 1992 and 1993, respectively.
