Sony has announced that it is discontinuing production of recordable Blu-ray, MiniDisc, and MD data disc media, along with MiniDV cassettes. Last year, Sony announced that it would phase out production of recordable optical media at its factory in Tagajo City, citing sluggish sales. Now, according to a Japanese webpage, production will definitively stop next month and there will be “no successor model.”
In its announcement, Sony referred to “Blu-ray Disc media,” meaning only recordable media, not Blu-ray discs, used to distribute movies (Engadget told Sony that the company (We asked them to confirm that only the production of recordable optical discs will be halted.) Sony currently offers 11 products in the recordable category, ranging from 25 GB to 128 GB, in both R (write once) and RE (write multiple times).
Sony has discontinued production of recordable Blu-ray discs, but they are still available from Verbatim and perhaps other companies. However, Sony is one of the few manufacturers left, so minidiscs may be hard to come by. So it’s a good idea to stock up while they’re still on sale.
MiniDiscs are primarily used for audio recording, but are slowly making a comeback among audiophiles, partly because they offer a more tactile experience than streaming. It is widely used among professionals due to its support for live recording, and it still maintains a presence in studios as much content is archived in that format. (Fun fact: Neo, the character from The Matrix, saves whatever bootlegged items he creates on minidiscs.)
Once popular for movie collections and file archiving, recordable Blu-ray and other optical media have been virtually wiped out by streaming services, cheap memory, and cloud storage. All the formats that Sony destroyed have been around for decades, with BD-RE appearing in 2002, MiniDisc in 1992, MD Data in 1993, and MiniDV, which is primarily used for video production. Cassettes first appeared in 1995.
