Petteri Pyyny
14 Jul 2024 5:31
Twenty years ago, a battle raged over which high-definition format would dethrone DVDs: Blu-ray or HD DVD.
As history shows, Blu-ray, developed by Sony, ultimately won the war, leading to the discontinuation of the Toshiba-backed HD DVD format in 2008. The "civilian casualties" of this battle were significant, with consumers having purchased over a million HD DVD players, which subsequently became nearly obsolete.
However, Blu-ray's victory came with a bitter twist. Shortly after its rise, streaming services began to gain traction. The biggest player in this arena, Netflix, expanded rapidly to new markets in early 2010s, making consumers to quickly abandon optical media in favour of streaming.
Another side of this story is Blu-ray's use as a storage medium. DVDs were wildly popular not only as a movie format, but also for data storage. The first recordable Blu-ray discs (BD-R) hit the market in 2007, but they never reached the same heights of popularity as recordable DVDs.
Now, Sony has announced it will cease production of consumer-grade recordable BD-R discs.
The decision is hardly surprising.
In hindsight, several factors contributed to the lack of success for recordable Blu-ray discs.
One of the key reasons is straightforward: Blu-ray piracy never reached the levels seen during the golden age of DVD movies. Pirates didn't buy blank Blu-ray discs to burn movies onto them, largely due to the rise of streaming services, which significantly reduced the overall piracy of movies and TV shows.
Moreover, in 2010s the HD movies could be compressed into smaller sizes as codecs improved. This meant that a FullHD movie didn't need the 25GB of storage the Blu-ray offered - instead a blank, much cheaper DVD-R disc was well enough.
Perhaps the most significant reason, however, was the advancement of technology. Hard drive storage space increased rapidly. At the beginning of the new millennium, the appx. 4.5GB storage capacity of a single-layer DVD-R was substantial compared to the average hard drives of the time. But a decade later, a 25GB recordable Blu-ray disc seemed small in comparison to the sizes of contemporary hard drives. Data could be "hoarded" on personal computers much more efficiently, reducing the need for physical media for data transfer.
The final blow came from the general shift in technology toward cloud services. Much of our day-to-day computing moved to the cloud, reducing the amount of data stored on physical home computers that would need to be backed up to external discs.
Recordable Blu-ray discs are not disappearing entirely; Sony will continue to offer BD-R discs for business use, promising longer data retention for corporate needs.