Reports of Blu-ray’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.
A breathless bunch of stories from Kotaku, The Verge, and others took a single sentence from a PDV posted by Sony to project the imminent demise of the format. Here’s the sentence in question:
Primarily due to demand for physical media contracting faster than anticipated, mainly in the European region, the future profitability of the disc manufacturing business has been revised.
All that means is that Blu-ray manufacturing won’t be making Sony as much money as it previously thought.
There’s good reason for that; Blu-ray was originally pushed as the high-definition successor to DVD. Movie releases usually cost more than the same releases on DVD, and many consumers didn’t see enough of a quality difference to pay extra.
At the same time, video streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime have transformed the way people watch movies and television. Rather than buying and storing physical media, viewers pay a monthly fee to watch as much as they want, and rarely watching the same thing more than once.
Still, the need exists for large-capacity, long-term storage. Sony is definitely not giving up on optical discs as a whole, because in cooperation with Panasonic it recently unveiled a roadmap for the Archival Disc. Capacities of 300GB, 500GB, and 1TB are planned for the next few years.
Your Blu-ray collection is safe. You’ll still be able to play them for a long time to come.
Do you use Blu-ray or other optical disc formats for data backup?
Have A Question? Ask Jessica!
-
Jessica: Hi, I'm Jessica, the Consumer Press AI, can I help you with a consumer question?
