Sony is ending production of recordable Blu-ray, MiniDisc and MD Data disc media, along with MiniDV cassettes, the company announced. Last year, Sony said that it would gradually end production of recordable optical media and production at its Tagajo City plant due to poor sales. Now, production will definitively halt next month and “there will be no successor models,” according to the Japanese web page.
In the announcement, Sony referred to “Blu-ray Disc media,” by which it means recordable media only, not Blu-ray discs used to distribute movies (Engadget asked Sony to confirm that it’s only halting recordable optical disc production). Sony currently offers 11 products in the recordable category, ranging from 25GB to 128GB, in both R (write once) and RE (write multiple times).
While Sony is ceasing production of recordable Blu-ray discs, they’re still available from Verbatim and possibly others. However, MiniDiscs may be hard to come by as Sony was one of the few remaining manufacturers — so you may want to stock up while they’re still for sale.
MiniDisc, mostly used for audio recording, has seen a bit of a resurgence among audiophiles due in part to the tactile experience compared to streaming. It was widely used by professionals as it supports live recording and still has a presence in studios because a lot of content has been archived to that format. (Fun fact: the character Neo in The Matrix stores his ill-begotten wares, whatever they are, on MiniDiscs.)
Once popular for movie collection and file archiving, recordable Blu-ray and other optical media were effectively killed by streaming services, cheap memory, and cloud storage. All of the formats Sony killed have been around for decades, with BD-RE arriving 2002, MiniDisc in 1992, MD Data in 1993 and MiniDV cassettes, primarily used for video production, first appearing in 1995.
