Sony is killing off recordable Blu-ray, bidding farewell to disc burning

zohaibahd

zohaibahd

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What just happened? For home videographers and data hoarders who still rely on optical discs for archiving, some bad news just dropped: Sony is winding down production of recordable Blu-ray media. The last factory in the world churning out those massive 100GB triple-layer and 128GB quad-layer BDXL discs is preparing to shut its lines for good.

In an interview Sony gave to AV Watch recently, the company admitted it's going to "gradually end development and production" of recordable Blu-rays and other optical disc formats at its Tagajo City plants in Miyagi Prefecture, Japan. Essentially, 25GB BD-REs, 50GB BD-RE DLs, 100GB BD-RE XLs, or 128GB BD-R XLs will soon not be available to consumers. Professional discs for video production and optical archives for data storage are also being discontinued.

Sony says it's pulling the plug because the cold storage market never really took off like they hoped, and the overall storage media business has been operating in the red for years. As the company put it bluntly, "We need to review our business structure in order to improve profitability."

It's not all bad news, though. The commercial Blu-ray discs you buy movies and games on will still be produced, so there's no need to panic about the death of physical media just yet.

The Tagajo factory is a bit of a legend; it's the only place left that could manufacture those massive 128GB quad-layer BDXL beasts. The engineers there were so dedicated, they kept developing new triple-layer disc tech even right after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami hit.

With disc production shutting down, Sony is also offering up to 250 of the 670 employees at the plant voluntary early retirement packages. The specific shut-down date is still TBD, but consumer disc sales will continue "for the time being" until current stocks run out at retailers. B2B customers will keep getting discs "in stock" for a while longer too.

If burning 100GB Blu-ray discs is still part of your data preservation strategy, you'd better start stocking up on those BDXL blank discs and drives while you still can. Prices are going to skyrocket once supplies dwindle.

It's the end of an era for disc-based backups. Sony first brought consumer recordable Blu-ray to market way back in 2003, giving us 25GB of space per disc – a huge leap over DVDs. Over the next 15 years they crammed more and more data onto discs, hitting 50GB, then 100GB, and finally the 128GB BDXL format in 2018.

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Sony is killing off recordable Blu-ray, bidding farewell to disc burning

 
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IMO, they were their own worst enemy with the ridiculous restrictions on being able to play BR movies on PC. But wake up and realize this, they won't. They would rather squeeze every possible penny out of people who just want to watch BRs on their PCs.

Luckily, for those of us who care, the rebellious types found a way around their restrictions. And I highly doubt there's a flood of pirated disk material that originated through using these work-arounds.
 
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wiyosaya said:
IMO, they were their own worst enemy with the ridiculous restrictions on being able to play BR movies on PC. But wake up and realize this, they won't. They would rather squeeze every possible penny out of people who just want to watch BRs on their PCs.

Luckily, they encountered the rebellious types found a way around their restrictions. And I highly doubt there's a flood of pirated disk material that originated through using these work-arounds.
Click to expand...
I think those restrictions were imposed by studios (including the Sony Studio ofc) in return for supporting BDs. HD-DVD was supported by tech companies and the porn industry (because they were cheaper).

This is one of the few examples where support from the porn industry didn't lead to the adoption of a certain standard :)
 
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@zohaibahd IMO, A more accurate headline for this would be "Sony is killing off its own Blu-ray disc production." They cannot kill off the production of the other manufacturers who manufacture Blu-ray media. Maybe that will eventually happen, but IMO, I doubt it will happen any time soon, and maybe the world followed Sony into Blu-ray disc land, but I highly doubt they will follow Sony out of Blu-ray land. There are far too many companies, especially media providers, the still distribute their material on Blu-ray, and I doubt they would be doing so if it were not profitable for them.

I know there's a crowd here on TS that hates Disney, but Disney tried to just do streaming only, and then eventually decided to distribute their "Streaming only" material on Blu-ray disc. Disney would never have done that if they had not thought they would make a profit on material distributed on Blu-ray. I can't say that I can give another example of a media providing company that went the same route as Disney, however, those streaming companies that offered only streaming versions of their material realized from the start that distributing their material on disc, DVD/Blu-ray, was profitable from the start.
 
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Puiu said:
I think those restrictions were imposed by studios (including the Sony Studio ofc) in return for supporting BDs. HD-DVD was supported by tech companies and the porn industry (because they were cheaper).

This is one of the few examples where support from the porn industry didn't lead to the adoption of a certain standard :)
Click to expand...
I can't say I disagree. It was the "Blu-ray Association" that was largely behind the draconian restrictions on PC playback, but Sony is a player in that crowd.

The Blu-ray Association had to "eat crow" when the Intel SGX bug reared it's ugly head with Plundervolt - which dumped Blu-ray keys when undervolting processors containing SGX instructions. One day, the dragons just might wake up. There are still plenty of Software packages that work well enough to decode and play Blu-ray and UHD Blu-ray discs.
 
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wiyosaya said:
IMO, they were their own worst enemy with the ridiculous restrictions on being able to play BR movies on PC. But wake up and realize this, they won't. They would rather squeeze every possible penny out of people who just want to watch BRs on their PCs.

Luckily, for those of us who care, the rebellious types found a way around their restrictions. And I highly doubt there's a flood of pirated disk material that originated through using these work-arounds.
Click to expand...

this product was not targeted for home users. This was a SMB archive tool.
 
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That is terrible news. The Archive maintains a very large optical disc library. Beside M-Disc DVD it uses large amounts of BD-R M-Disc from 25GB to 100GB. If they discontinue BD-R they need to come out with the long-anticipated laser engraved synthetic quartz technology to archive digital data. If digital data is not engraved on a hard substrate...it is not archival.

Blu-ray discs are not all the same when it comes to being archival. Here are some tests I've done on BD-R media. Before adopting a disc for archiving data within the Archive I always test it. The only problem with this is; the companies are always changing the discs. So, you could get a disc that passes archival tests and they change it to lower quality later on and it is not archival.

Here are some of the 1-year sun stress test results for 25GB BD-R. Discs were put in a clear plastic jewel case and exposed to the sun for 1 year. (Some failed much sooner.)

Verbatim BD-R 25GB purchased in 2019 / Japanese manufactured - Passed

Verbatim BD-R 25GB purchased in 2020-2021 / Taiwan manufactured - Passed

Verbatim M-Disc BD-R 25GB purchased in 2019 / Taiwan manufactured - Passed

Optical Quantum / Optodisc BD-R 25GB purchased in 2019 / Taiwan manufactured - Failed within 5 weeks of sun.

Smartbuy BD-R 25GB purchased in 2019 / Taiwan manufactured - Failed within 5 weeks of sun.

PlexDisc BD-R 25GB purchased in 2019 / Taiwan manufactured - Failed within 5 weeks of sun.

Ridata BD-R 25GB purchased in 2023 / Taiwan manufactured - 2755 files total on disc / 9 files failed to load after 1 year of sun.

Note: The Ridata inkjet printable discs have strong chemical smell when new. Whereas none of the other discs tested has this strong smell.

verbatim-bd-r-japan-6.30.20-3.15.21-d.d.teoli-jr..jpg


optical-quantun-bd-r-sun-test-3.14.21-9.1.21-d.d.teoli-jr..jpg


plexdisc-bd-r-sun-test-7.19.21-9.6.21-d.d.teoli-jr..jpg



There will be no way to archive digital data without archival optical media or laser engraved quartz. Tape is not archival.


405461947_MDiscboiltestD.D.TeoliJr(2)l.thumb.jpg.af73c7994dcfbf872270f3a380091c77.jpg




Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Archival Collection
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Small Gauge Film Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Advertising Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. VHS Video Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Popular Culture Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Audio Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Social Documentary Photography
 
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Before that news, I already noticed the stock of BD-REs was really dwindling, so only BD-Rs were found. I know BD-REs don't last as long as BD-Rs, but with the scarcity of players and good blanks to burn media, things are really going south...

I burned in the last 1-2 years my first Blu-rays, and now I have almost 250 discs. Of course I'll never rely on streaming or the "cloud" to keep my data, in the hopes it will last long enough. And no flash drives or similar... only discs can be trusted for cold storage. Murray's Blog (Ligos) made a series of articles for long term archiving and reached that conclusion, and the same for PlotinusVeritas's "Methodology to protect your data. Backups vs. Archives. Long-term data protection", posted on Apple forums.
 
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I checked those Verbatim discs - about $2 each , nice size for a many FHD remuxes,
But a hard drive is cheaper, Given that other benefits especially f have a high end player .
People are snapping up 4K discs when cheap. Very good chance they will keep their value . Would see it as an investment , but for a movie buff and someone who likes the full tactile experience. I sure their dependants could sell them off in 30 years
 
I had a Bluray writer a decade ago but the multi layer discs were fairly expensive and the write speeds were not great. I think the drive itself was $150 or so.

Admittedly you were writing a lot of data if you had a dual layer Bluray disc but you were still talking over 30 minutes for the 50GB discs at reasonable write speeds. 6x was pretty common for many discs.

This was at least 10 years ago and at that point you could start to get USB 3.0 1TB portable hard drives for reasonable prices, which were far faster to read or write.

Not only that not that many people had a Bluray drive to read the discs anyway. By then everyone had a computer or TV with USB support to plug a HDD into if you moved around video files a lot like I did.
 
Honestly, the only use I have anymore for CD/DVD/BR disks is for installing retro operating systems onto retro hardware...mainly on hardware that's so old that it doesn't support booting from USB. Even so, I can't remember the last time I even broke out copies of Windows 95/98, XP, or Windows 2000....maybe 10 years ago? I've also experienced too much bit rot and fatal scratches on removable media to want to trust my data to it. I'll keep backing up my data to my RAID arrays. Removable media is like the walking dead and the Japanese are just now starting to notice. But then again the Japanese govt. just dropped the requirement for floppy disks for internal govt. processes. This is what happens when you have human dinosaurs running your country. Sounds like Sony and the Japanese govt. are stuck in 1999.
 
brucek said:
If it's not going to be optical media, what are enterprises and other users who accumulate large amounts of data that needs to be reliably preserved in offline backups going to use?
Click to expand...
Not many companies use offline storage anymore. They use off-site storage/backups in many forms though. Off-site RAID systems, off-site NAS drives and off-site cloud storage. For companies that still use offline storage, they mainly use portable RAID arrays and some still use tape because it's inexpensive and fairly reliable. The most popular tape format for data storage, LTO (linear tape open), has a current capacity of 19 terabytes of native storage and up to 45 TB of compressed data. And this is projected to double by the next generation of LTO and reach 144 TB native and 360 TB compressed capacity within three generations.
 
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brucek said:
If it's not going to be optical media, what are enterprises and other users who accumulate large amounts of data that needs to be reliably preserved in offline backups going to use?
Click to expand...
1) Tapes. Places often use LTO tape. The capacity is very high, up in the dozens of TB range per tape. That's what Amazon and them are doing for their offline tiers.

2) Cloudy style stuff. I don't mean "Oh, they're just loading it into AWS", I mean SANs have mechanisms to snapshot information, to behave as a tape drive in some cases for software that expects tapes (so they are not "live" backups where it'll just back up corrupted data if it gets corrupted). And ensure there are at least 3 copies of each piece of information (ensuring they aren't on the same disk, same machine, and same rack if it's a multi-rack system) to protect against loss due to hardware failure. HDD prices are VERY low -- it's like $60 or so for the empty case with 0TB in it, plus about $10-20/TB for platters and heads... I.e. a 1TB disk is like $70 (not a very good deal) but a 25TB one at that pricing would be $310 (which is about where they are.)
 
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danielteolijr said:
That is terrible news. The Archive maintains a very large optical disc library. Beside M-Disc DVD it uses large amounts of BD-R M-Disc from 25GB to 100GB. If they discontinue BD-R they need to come out with the long-anticipated laser engraved synthetic quartz technology to archive digital data. If digital data is not engraved on a hard substrate...it is not archival.

Blu-ray discs are not all the same when it comes to being archival. Here are some tests I've done on BD-R media. Before adopting a disc for archiving data within the Archive I always test it. The only problem with this is; the companies are always changing the discs. So, you could get a disc that passes archival tests and they change it to lower quality later on and it is not archival.

Here are some of the 1-year sun stress test results for 25GB BD-R. Discs were put in a clear plastic jewel case and exposed to the sun for 1 year. (Some failed much sooner.)

Verbatim BD-R 25GB purchased in 2019 / Japanese manufactured - Passed

Verbatim BD-R 25GB purchased in 2020-2021 / Taiwan manufactured - Passed

Verbatim M-Disc BD-R 25GB purchased in 2019 / Taiwan manufactured - Passed

Optical Quantum / Optodisc BD-R 25GB purchased in 2019 / Taiwan manufactured - Failed within 5 weeks of sun.

Smartbuy BD-R 25GB purchased in 2019 / Taiwan manufactured - Failed within 5 weeks of sun.

PlexDisc BD-R 25GB purchased in 2019 / Taiwan manufactured - Failed within 5 weeks of sun.

Ridata BD-R 25GB purchased in 2023 / Taiwan manufactured - 2755 files total on disc / 9 files failed to load after 1 year of sun.

Note: The Ridata inkjet printable discs have strong chemical smell when new. Whereas none of the other discs tested has this strong smell.

verbatim-bd-r-japan-6.30.20-3.15.21-d.d.teoli-jr..jpg


optical-quantun-bd-r-sun-test-3.14.21-9.1.21-d.d.teoli-jr..jpg


plexdisc-bd-r-sun-test-7.19.21-9.6.21-d.d.teoli-jr..jpg



There will be no way to archive digital data without archival optical media or laser engraved quartz. Tape is not archival.


405461947_MDiscboiltestD.D.TeoliJr(2)l.thumb.jpg.af73c7994dcfbf872270f3a380091c77.jpg




Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Archival Collection
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Small Gauge Film Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Advertising Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. VHS Video Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Popular Culture Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Audio Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Social Documentary Photography
Click to expand...

Optical discs are not now, nor will they ever be, a suitable media for archival storage. Anybody that thought so was only deluding themselves. They decay over a short period of years, relatively speaking. Also, keep in mind that the BDA may regulate the usage of them, but they are a non-profit that doesn't actually own the technology. Sony invented it, and they own. If they say everyone has to stop making them, nobody gets a choice.
 
Thanks. If it were me I'd want at least one copy on write-once media that could not be further altered and was not controllable via any online means (I..e, physical access required and presumably very hard to achieve without authorization.) Anything else feels too subject to ransomware or other attack if the wrong credentials leak (and it seems like they too often do.)
 
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I am a bit confused by the article. Does it mean that after a certain future date, no recordable Blu-Ray media will be available, or is it only the higher densities, that only SONY could make, which will become unavailable, while basic recordable Blu-Ray disks will continue to be made and sold? If the latter, even if many of them are of lesser quality and thus not genuinely archival, while this is still bad news, it is not quite so disastrous.
 
Puiu said:
It was to be expected, very few actually wrote blu-ray discs at home. There will still be other manufacturers that will produce them for a long time.
Click to expand...
Just transferred a TV series to Blu-ray, I was able to get 8 episodes per 25 GB disks. Have some 50's and five 100's very expensive!😲😲
 
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