Sony is reportedly ceasing development and production of recordable optical media, including Blu-ray Discs, as it moves toward an all-digital future.
The news went viral a week ago, but was only recently confirmed in an interview with a Japanese media outlet. Watch AV (via Gizmodo & Tweak City).
Sony had previously reported cutting 250 jobs at its Japanese optical media plant. Sony confirmed the job cuts and said it had no plans to relocate the plant overseas.
This doesn’t mean the end of physical media for movies or games, though. Sony has said it plans to continue its B2B business, so games and movies for business customers will continue to be printed and produced until it’s no longer profitable.
In a statement, they added that “for consumer products, we will decide 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.”
This means that blank recordable disc formats (CD-R, DVD-R, BD-R), often used for archival purposes, will no longer be manufactured and are expected to become difficult to find. This is effectively the end of Blu-ray as a recording medium, with most archiving operations now being moved to SSDs or the cloud.