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
the whole point is to stop you from owning physical media so they can arbitrarily raise prices by creating artificial cause and demand through artificial scarcity.
anyone remember when the argument for digital goods was " We wont have to waste money on boxes, printing, media, storage, or shipping! So your goods will be cheaper than ever, and everyone will still get a more profitable cut!"
Pepperidge farm Remembers, because Pepperidge farm called bullshit on the argument back at the very start, and said they would get rid of physical media, not lower prices, and that we would lose ownership of our purchases... and the internet poopoo'd me to hell in back calling me paranoid and stupid for it.
and look where we are.
and its so goddamn fucked up I don't even get a single molecule of serotonin from being right about it.
Jokes on Sony, they stopped getting my money years ago.
Damn, that's some Qanon-level shit.
I mean, except it's not a conspiracy. The death of physical media is an actual tragedy because digital media is nowhere near as free.
It's to the point where much of the media I love is actually not available legally and officially for physical ownership, in some cases becoming actual lost media physically, and not available for purchase or even download anymore.
Companies absolutely want to control the consumption of media in more restrictive ways that they can control, it's not a conspiracy, it's the actual truth.
DRM, always online, digital only, subscription services - they are all designed to remove you further and further from being an owner.
Everything from video games, music, movies...all entertainment media is moving in this direction and it's an actual tragedy.
I’ll be sure to buy extras, since it’s clear this is yet another push towards the consumer market not deserving to own their media.
That one died a few days ago too.
Right as I'm getting into minidisc too
Eyyy yes! I just picked up an MZ-N505 a few months ago! It's been great at work to quickly start music without staring at my phone for 5 minutes first.
I was just getting the hang of cassettes !
"Press Play on tape."
(makes lunch)
"File found. Loading..."
(takes a bath, goes for a walk, reads a book...)
Ah the memories...
I think the data variant stores 1GB... good enough for archiving invoices and the like...
You can get some pretty cheap used ones. At less than $2 each.
Yeah but the thing that helps keep them at $2 is a supply of new ones
Damn. I was just starting to rebuild my physical catalog so I could get away from streaming.
Movies are not sold on recordable media, they are sold on pressed discs. There are a lot more manufacturers than just Sony too.
Keep doing it. Especially niche titles.
You think I can find tv shows like greg the bunny, or clerks the animated series? And then TV shows start retroactively saying whats ok to show and whats not. Then pulling the episodes from streaming.
Or maybe the rights run out, and no other streaming picks it up.
I've started building mine up again, too, because too often a movie I want to watch isn't available to stream and purchasing a physical copy costs less than a digital copy.
thin laptops and LED Disco Cases killed CD-readers anyways. it's a shame to loose a cheap way of making media archives, but it is what it is.
Keep in mind that though this is a blow to the industry, it's not like optical media is just yet dead. Hell, there are still new releases to DVDs coming out today.
Space jam 3! And independent film featuring bugs 🐛 and a 🐇 bunny. The Matrix Housing Crisis.... A film featuring Keanu as the one. He doesn't collect enough retirement money so he's out there pushing a cart. We saw a preview of him in "the matrix". That bum in the subway... anyway good movie 😂.
So that they can fully control the fate of digital media for "normal" people. Better not lapse on that subscription or fail to upgrade to the latest Sony TV... "Your" media library might not like that, be a shame if you lost access to those pretty titles you love..
Found a small part of the problem.
Physical media is dying because the majority of people think just as short sighted as businesses do. Businesses think in short term thoughts like quarters. They do so because investers want immediate return.
But why would you as a person not want physical media??? I literally bought a George Carlin dvd of one of his HBO specials 2 days ago. It was traded into a local resale shop as "used". It was brand new, because even though the plastic wrap was gone, the adhesive label at the top was still unbroken. Brand new dvd. $3.
Most people don't know how to switch between inputs on their TVs or have gotten rid of their DVD or BluRay players at this point.
They're using the built in streaming apps or they've plugged a Roku in where the cable box used to go.
For me, physical media takes up more space. It's a good thing and a bad thing. It takes up more space which means I need to have more space, but it's also cool having the boxes and box art etc. Ultimately, as long as I own my media and it's physically accessible to me (like located on my hard drive), then I am happy with that ownership and don't have to worry about it being taken away from me. Also, physical media can be damaged which means it's unusable entirely. With a proper RAID setup and backups, digital media can outlast physical media.
MiniDisks too? Nooo!
Wow I'm having a hard time believing that Sony of all people would abandon a technology
You will own nothing and you will be happy.
I'm perfectly fine with storing media on flash drives. Optical disks just adds an unnecessary step between me and enjoying my movies.
Flash loses bits of data without power
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.