Sony is reportedly ceasing development and production of recordable optical media, including Blu-ray discs, as it moves to an all-digital future.
The news first made the rounds a week ago, but has only been confirmed in the past day or so in an interview with Japanese outlet AV Watch (via Gizmodo & Tweak Town).
That earlier reporting indicated Sony had made 250 jobs redundant at its Japanese optical media plant. Sony has confirmed those redundancies and says there are no plans to move the plant overseas.
This does NOT mean the end of physical media for movies or games as yet. Sony indicates they plan to continue business-to-business operations and so games and movies from corporate customers will still be printed and produced until no longer profitable.
In a statement, they add that “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.”
What it does mean is that blank recordable disc formats (CD-R, DVD-R, BD-R), which are often used for archiving purposes, will no longer be made and are expected to become hard to find. It’s effectively the end for Blu-ray as a recordable medium with most archiving shifted these days to SSDs or the cloud.
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