Sony has announced it will discontinue the manufacture of Blu-ray discs, a format it invented and championed, setting the stage for the possible imminent end of the optical format.
As the world has embraced streaming in recent years, Blu-ray sales have declined sharply, paving the way for Sony’s decision.
“Thank you very much for your continued support of Sony products,” the consumer electronics giant said in a Japanese posting in one of its online support forums and translated by TechCentral using software.
“As of February 2025, we will discontinue production of all Blu-ray Disc media, recording MiniDiscs, MD data for recording, and MiniDV cassettes. There is no successor model,” it said, according to the translation.
Sony will no longer produce Blu-ray discs and the other formats from February, it said.
The company released Blu-ray commercially in 2006 as a successor to the DVD format, which had severe limitations in the amount of data that could be stored on each disc.
As the world moved to high definition (720p and 1080p) – and later to 4K UHD – Blu-ray gradually superseded DVD. It was used mainly for gaming consoles like Sony’s PlayStation and Microsoft’s Xbox and for movies and box sets of television series.
Format war
Blu-ray discs originally supported up to 25GB of data, though that expanded over the years as the technology improved.
Sony had been working on Blu-ray since around 2000, when the first prototypes were unveiled. Its release in 2006 sparked a format war with the competing HD DVD standard, which had the backing of Sony rival Toshiba. Blu-ray quickly won the battle with HD DVD, however, and cemented itself as the new optical disc standard after it was widely adopted by the Hollywood studios.
Read: New DVD-sized optical disc stores 125 000GB of data
It is possible Blu-ray discs will continue to be available given that Sony isn’t the only company that manufactures them. But the Japanese firm’s decision likely means that the format is not long of this world. – © 2025 NewsCentral Media
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