Sony will cut around 250 jobs from the recordable media business manufacturing hub and will gradually cease production of optical discs, including Blu-ray discs.
Sony will cut around 250 jobs from the recordable media business manufacturing hub and will gradually cease production of optical discs, including Blu-ray discs.

Sony Group to cut 250 jobs from recordable media business' key hub - The Mainichi

Welp... There goes physical media...
Yep, I'm sure it'll be gone Verbatim.
Take your upvote
Its an old code but it checks out 😅
It’s just one company, it’s not all the Blu-ray production stopping. I think the last time I bought any Sony recordable media was CD-Rs for my MP3 CD player in the mid 00s.
Sony owns the blu-ray format. I'm worried.
🏴☠️
I always preferred the rips fork Blu rays though. They had the highest quality video and audio and stuff. This sucks so much =(
EDIT: I just read someone else's comment that although they developed it they don't own it outright so that makes me feel a little better that hopefully other people can still make them.
How do SSDs and HDDs compare to optical disks in terms of stability in storage? SSD bits can lose charge over time until a lot of 1s read as 0s, right?
SSDs are pretty pricey for video. I use HDDs, mirrored. For some uses I put a SSD caching layer on top to speed up frequent R/W. Using only LVM, no fancy RAID hardware or anything.
Commercially pressed discs don't last forever, but longer than burnable discs. IIRC, they used to say 50 years for CDs, but in practice, it was a lot less. More like 20 or 30 if you store and handle them nicely. Easily less than 10 if you don't.
Hard drives go bad over time; I don't like trusting spinning platters much over 7 years. They can be OK, but they can suddenly stop working whenever.
SSDs are about the same as spinning platters.
I guess hard drives and SSDs don't count as physical somehow?
Even on a streaming service, the files are stored physically somewhere.
All media is still, technically, physical media.
Even when you stream it locally and don't have access to the file itself, it physically lives in your RAM for the duration of the stream.
When was the last time you walked into any store and bought a feature length film or tv show on hard drive or SSD?
What is your plan when the licence agreement for your favorite series expires on your chosen streaming service and no other streaming service picks up the show?
No one is arguing this. You're making the strawman arguement. The not-so-subtle undertone of the article is clear.
Quoting the article:
You will not be allowed to legally own tv shows or films and you should learn to like it. As I can tell from many of the other comments here, not many of us are fans of that idea.
You are very much missing the point for the sake of a pedantic argument.
Someone else already perfectly illustrated the point in a comment below, so I guess I'm spared the effort.
It physically lives encrypted in your RAM and only temporarily. Remember TPM exists.