Sony is discontinuing the production of Blu-ray, MiniDisc and MD Data recordable disk media, as well as MiniDV cassettes, the company has announced. Last year, Sony said it was phasing out the production of optical recording media at its Tagajo plant due to low sales. Now, production will be finally halted next month, and “there will be no successor models,” according to a Japanese website.
In the announcement, Sony refers to “Blu-ray Disc media,” which means only recordable media, not the Blu-ray discs used for movie distribution (Engadget has reached out to Sony to confirm that they are only discontinuing the production of recordable optical discs). Currently, Sony offers 11 products in the writable disk category ranging from 25GB to 128GB in both R (write once) and RE (write multiple times) formats.
Although Sony is discontinuing Blu-ray recordable disks, they are still available from Verbatim and possibly other manufacturers. However, MiniDisc discs may be hard to come by as Sony was one of the few remaining manufacturers, so you may want to stock up while they are still on sale.
The MiniDisc, which was mostly used for audio recording, has recently had a bit of a resurgence among audiophiles, partly due to the tactile feel compared to streaming. It has been widely used by professionals because it supports live recording, and it is still present in studios because a lot of content has been archived in this format. (Fun fact: the character Neo in the movie The Matrix keeps his loot, whatever it is, on MiniDiscs).
Once popular for movie collecting and file archiving, Blu-ray discs and other optical media have been virtually wiped out by streaming services, cheap memory, and cloud storage. All the formats that Sony destroyed had been around for decades: BD-RE was introduced in 2002, MiniDisc in 1992, MD Data in 1993, and MiniDV cassettes, which were used primarily for video production, first appeared in 1995.
