Sony Is Killing the Blu-ray, but Physical Media Isn't Dead Yet

In time, we'll all consider this issue (the dearth of physical media) one of the most important of our current era.

The bulk of all that precious data your family is hoarding is going to bite the dust before you do.

All those drives with your home videos are rusting away. They won't last into your old age.

All those photos you entrusted to FA*NG companies - some of whom won't be around in 10 years, and none of whom will remember they ever had your data in 50 - they're going away, too.

If you want to keep your data into your old age, you might have luck with a tape drive, but I wouldn't trust the tape to last 50+ years, nor the ability to find a working drive that can read them.

The only viable option for keeping data, if you give it serious thought, is recordable Bluray.

So decreased availability is lousy news for the public. For future historians... depressing.

I don't know about new releases, but I definitely have begun buying physical media (dvds) where I can. I'm extremely tired of shell games around availability on different streaming services. If I can't have my own copy of it, I'm not particularly interested in it.

> while most modern hard drives are lucky to make it to five years.

Lots of people say things like this, but I have still never even heard of a normal consumer disk with normal access patterns¹ failing in even ten years, across dozens of hard disk drives (3.5″ PATA, 3.5″ SATA, 2.5″ SATA) and solid state drives (2.5″ SATA, NVMe). The last disk I remember hearing of failing was probably around ten years ago, and it would probably have been fifteen years old.² I’ve heard of laptops dying of other causes, but not disk failure any time recently.

Now USB flash drives, I definitely encountered a few failures at less than five years of age over a decade ago (in 2011, I started one week running some tech for an event with three sticks 2–6 years old, and by the end of the week all three were dead!), but haven’t encountered a failure in the last decade (mind you, I haven’t used them as much either).

By similar token, I’ve heard people saying things about consumer-written optical media commonly becoming unreadable in a decade with careful storage, but never had any issue with reading CDs burned fifteen years ago.

All up, it seems to me that people commonly say all these things barely last a few years, but it just doesn’t match my experience at all.

—⁂—

¹ The only thing I’m excluding by this is Backblaze storage pods, which are clearly not typical of consumers, and will obviously hasten mean time to failure.

² My favourite drive at present, one that by rights should have failed, is the second drive in my laptop: 256 GB capacity, 326 TB read, 140 TB written, 119% used, SMART failed. It spent the first threeish years of its life in a Windows laptop with 8 GB of RAM and a workload that would have filled 32 GB of RAM. This caused lots of swapping, amounting to about 500 GB of I/O per day. It fails SMART and has 2031 error information log entries, but still works fine for now, and hasn’t got any worse since I rescued it. Oh, and I also improved its aboriginal habitat, giving it another 8 GB of RAM when I upgraded my own laptop to a 32GB stick; the owner said that made the laptop perform much better.

I just told my young boys about this sad news.

They've recently gotten very into visiting retro gaming stores and buying DS, Wii and other console games.

The death of physical media means the death of video game stores (eg. EB games), and the death of the second hand market, the very market which allows retro gaming stores of this generation to thrive.

The kids of my boys won't be able to experience the games of the next generation of consoles because their game stores will have been shut and entire generations of games no longer available unless said company decides to re-release them again.

That's just games.

Movies have a similar problem. I can see Archive.org becoming very popular for accessing what publishers have decided they no longer want, or care for, being available.

It's really too bad there isn't something like M-Disc with a 1TB capacity and the price of current BD-R discs. We're missing a good data archival solution these days.

I don’t own a 4k TV, yet, but someday I would like to watch the Lord of the Ring movies in 4K. It seems silly to buy the discs and a 4k player when I don’t anticipate buying a 4k TV anytime soon, but… I keep wondering if the physical disks or the player will go away before that day comes. Is this FOMO or a realistic concern?

So the article that wants me to feel good about physical media being replaced with (DRM-encumbered) streaming contains embedded media which proudly proclaims:

This video is restricted from playing in your current geographic region

In the words of Dr. Evil: "Riiight."

Title is clickbait trash. They’re only ceasing production of recordable media, they’re still producing commercial disks.

I can't see the next generation of the Sony Playstation console be as successful as the PS5 in my area if they abandon physical media altogether. A lot of people still use console games because they can sell and buy games second hand.

The price would need to go down to a spotify/netflix monthly subscription for people to use a console without physical medias in my area.

For those thinking about long-term data storage: first and foremost it's a process, not "a thing to get done".

Think about both a) migrating and b) growing capacity needs at the same time vs your usage pattern. It may happen that for your case any write-once media is simply never the best choice. (it will always take a lot longer to migrate a stack of CDs/DVDs/BluRays than to plug a new bigger drive alongside the end-of-live'ing old drive)

(and please appreciate the Venn diagram of `backup` and `long-term storage`; it's not 100% overlap)

Sony is not the sole producer of recordable Blu-ray media though, right? This concerns a Japanese factory and the BD-R I have in front of me says Made in Vietnam.

Drive compatibility with blu-ray is horrible. Unlike DVD, which seems to work with any major OS—Windows, Linux, OS X

This is bad. With no immutable media, society is very vulnerable.

We will regret this.

I just buy internal high-capacity (at least 10 TB) HDDs and use an USB SATA controller. I use Borg backup for archival, at least 2 copies on 2 HDDs. It seems more reliable than DVDs.

Is tape reasonable for aficionado home users?

I have a blu-ray writer, and blu-ray disks, from Verbatim. The article implies Sony is ending humanity's ability to do archiving on blu-ray

Is Sony affecting Verbatim's ability to produce these?