Consoles, in their day, were the great promoters of Blu-ray technology, which now seems to have its days numbered. These solutions, which came to replace the DVD, encountered a paradigm shift that made them obsolete. panasonic announced that in february it will end forever the Blu-ray production.
Currently, consoles maintain Blu-ray players residually, as currently most of the games are downloaded. Content streaming, such as Netflix or HBO, has also made these optical players uninteresting to the user. And it is that optical discs have been in a constant recession for some time
Panasonic will stop producing them in a few days
The Blu-ray format, for those who don’t know, was introduced to the market in 2005 by Sony, TDK, Philips and Microsoft. This format had the great support of Sony, who would use it on their PlayStation 4 in a remarkable way. The truth is that over time its importance has been diluted due to content streaming.
Was in 2006 whenwhere Panasonic startedor to market their own Blu-ray optical drives and players for this format. Now, the company has said it will be discontinuing the products from February this year. No workarounds will be released and when the stock runs out, it runs out.
They point out that the demand for recordable Blu-ray discs has decreased significantly and that their profitability is difficult to maintain. Note that since 2006 they have sold a total of 330 million records. Normally people used them to store data, but nowadays Blu-ray recorders and players are very expensive compared to USB sticks or external hard drives.
Currently, external USB Blu-ray recorders start at 100 dollars and then you have to buy the discs. The good thing is that each Blu-ray disc costs around 0.8 to 1 Euro, which is not a bad price. But they have problems, you need a Blu-ray player to access the information, something that rarely has anyone.
The simplest, most comfortable and cheapest is a 128 GB USB key which can cost between 10 and 20 dollars. Every computer has a USB port and you can save and delete information quickly and easily.
Sony remains the only manufacturer
This means that after Panasonic went out of business, Sony is the only (significant) manufacturer of Blu-ray optical drives. Something that is not strange, since Sony has great strength in the console market and also in audiovisual. It seems difficult for Sony to leave this market today, given that the PS5 and Xbox Series X support this format.
Everything indicates that the existence of Blu-ray is temporary. When Sony and Microsoft make the leap to their next generation of consoles, the most logical thing is that they drop the optical drive. This format makes little sense, considering that more and more people are going digital.
Increasingly, in Europe it is common to find high-speed Internet connections. Additionally, the games receive regular updates that add improvements or fix bugs. Anything outside of the game’s “basic” format that can be found on an optical disc.
