After 18 years, Blu-ray media production draws to a close — Sony shuts its last factory in Feb

Sony has announced it will end Blu-ray Disc media production in February, marking the end of its nearly two-decade run. Unfortunately, it will also mark the end of optical media storage for the company as a whole, as Sony said there won’t be a successor model to the Blu-ray. This end-of-production announcement also affects MiniDiscs for recording, MD data for recording, and MiniDV cassettes.

The company ended the production of consumer Blu-ray and optical disks in mid-2024, indicating it would retain production lines for business and corporate clients until it became unprofitable. However, as the general public has come to prefer streaming services over physical media, commercial sales seem to have quickly become insufficient to sustain Sony’s optical media business.

The first Blu-ray disc prototype was released in 2000, which was designed as a successor to the DVD and competed against Toshiba’s HD DVD. Both Blu-ray and HD DVD became publicly available in 2006, but the latter lost out to the former in the format wars because of Sony’s partnership with film studios and the inclusion of Blu-ray technology in the PlayStation 3.

This end of production would make Blu-ray discs and players much harder to acquire from retail stores, although they’re still widely available on online platforms like Amazon.

While ODD ownership peters out, many users are storing important files using cloud storage, but this usually has a monthly cost and could become prohibitive if you’re storing a large amount of data. Putting your data online also raises a lot of security issues. Some users and organizations prefer storing files on hard drives that typically come with a lifespan estimated at five years. If you don’t move their contents to a new drive within that time, you risk losing the information within them — something that the music industry is just discovering now.

If stored properly, optical media could be viable for decades, which makes it an ideal medium for long-term cold storage. While Sony is no longer making Blu-ray, its competitor, Pioneer, has found a niche in long-term storage and created a Blu-ray disc designed to last a hundred years. Other researchers are even working on archival glass storage that should last 5,000 years.

Still, Sony ending production of Blu-ray disks marks the end of an era. This will ikely make it harder for movie collectors to have their own curated media libraries and have the tactile feeling of selecting their favorite movie from a stack of hundreds. But this move to streaming libraries, where there is no ownership and the movies and shows you watch could simply disappear without warning, reminds us how fleeting life can be.