This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
We must cut all options for the end user to own anything, let'em pay subscriptions instead.
In a SONY board meeting, probably.
Why are we suddenly selling more NAS grade HDDs?
Something tells me the market for media servers is very different than the market for BD-R. The only benefit to having a collection of burned discs over a NAS is that you can let people borrow them. It's otherwise mostly downsides
Eh, I doubt many people are burning their own Blu-ray discs - this does not apply to discs you buy that already have films on, those are manufactured differently, and are still being made.
But even if you do archive your personal data onto Blu-ray discs, there are still other manufacturers besides Sony.
This really isn't a big deal.
Nah, probably just didn't sell enough, with USB sticks around and all.
I believe they've said that this doesn't change their production of non-rewritable Blu-rays.
Different divisions. This is more akin to when Sony decided to stop making floppy disks. The market is there for now, but it's just not worth it from a financial perspective.
The amount of people burning their own blu rays is minimal. Even the type of people who emphasize owning their own content just use a NAS system.
I find it kinda funny Sony tried so hard to own the standard so many times thought they eventually got it but then the Internet made it irrelavent almost instantly.
I don't like Sony.
Am with you. Their midrange phones still have headphone jacks, though. I like that.
Yeah their phones do generally still do things like microsds etc which is very nice I also like the psp but I've bought so many Sony products that develop weird faults straight after the warranty and the fact they alway push propriety cards etc.
Its a weird company where divisions seem to actively sabotage each other I just don't trust them at all.
Sony phones are pretty great for stuff like this tbh
MicroSD
dual SIM
headphone jacks (this is despite Sony being one of the biggest names in Bluetooth audio and therefore more likely to benefit from getting rid of 3.5mm)
they stuck to notification LEDs longer than anybody (sadly stopped on their newest gen IIRC?
dedicated 2-stage camera shutter buttons
no notch, no hole punch
stereo, front-facing speakers
first to embrace water resistance on smartphones
an OS that doesn't treat you like a complete baby. It shows some relatively advanced options in the settings app and actually explains what they mean and why you'd want to use them. I appreciate that.
shockingly FOSS friendly, even going as far as providing bootable AOSP builds on their GitHub, as well as contributing more to AOSP code than anybody other than Google themselves, despite being a niche OEM. A lot of the battery optimisations in Android are actually a Sony contribution, for example.
There's a few things that suck. They need to extend their software support, their naming is dreadful (yes I know it follows the camera division naming, it's still dumb), and they try to charge Apple/Samsung prices despite not being in the same dominant market position. But overall their Xperia division actually puts out some good stuff IMO.
I've never had a need to burn a blu-ray. When bd-r's hit the scene with their obscenely priced recording drives, it was only maybe a year or two before flash memory had already become cheap and fast enough that any volume of data large enough to justify a BD was better served on a 16/32gb thumbdrive unless it needed to be distributed in volume, and I've never needed to make enough identical copies of something to justify the $200-$300 that the first drives cost.
It sucks losing an option but I actually doubt most anyone will notice. 3rd party manufacturers will keep making disc's for a while anyway, Sony is far from the only company doing this technology.
I use archival blurays for cheap, deep storage for decade plus usage, not something I'd trust to flash memory or even a hard drive. Tape is an option of course but that's pricey.
Don't fret, Verbatim will still be making recordable BD-Rs. However, this will mean that there will be no more 128GB BD-Rs, we'll be stuck with only 100GB BD-Rs (Sony is the only company that makes 128GB Blu-rays).
I recently ordered a pack of 128GBs from Japan. I'd recommend you do the same, because the prices are gonna skyrocket.
May I ask what uses you have for them?
Backing up personal data, mostly stuff from my childhood that is irreplacable. Sure, I could just put them on a HDD, but then I'd have to replace it every 5-10 years. Data stored on Blu-ray can last a long time.
Data on hard drives also generally lasts a long time. Much longer than 5-10 years.
And make sure you're constantly monitoring those discs, disc rot is very much a thing for all optical medica.
Bluray disk cost 25$ for 50gb and usb flash drive cost 5$ for 64gb
Damn, a 50gb blu ray costs 2€ in my country.
for 35€ you can get 512gb flash drive. kinda insane to think about that. maybe even cheaper but that was just what I found from my local store
This is just blank writable discs, movies and TV shows on bluray will continue to be produced... for now.
It's okay, in 75 years Japan's government will still be keeping them alive. That's why you can still buy floppy discs on Amazon.
Japan just gave up the floppy (officially), but there will still be other legacy users.
Until VERY recently the US nuclear arsenal required 8" floppies. Disks that went out of favor in the early 70s because they can only spin for a few hours before they start to corrupt.
The one that most blew my mind was that my local Walmart only stopped selling blank BetaMax tapes in the mid 00’s. By the time the store was built they weren’t even selling movies on VHS anymore, but the blanks were still worthy of limited shelf space.
I have a BluRay drive capable of burning but I've never needed it for that. I've been mostly using it for my ancient cd collection.
I really wish there was a viable alternative for physical backups. Blu-ray just doesn't have enough storage space, tape is expensive, and hard drives need to be periodically read.
I've read about holographic WORM media, but I just don't think there's enough consumer demand for the hardware and media to ever be as affordable as blu-ray.
Once upon a time, I could back up all my important data to a stack of DVD-Rs. How am I supposed to back up a 100TB NAS, though? The "best" alternative is to build a second NAS for backup, but that's approaching tape drive levels of cost.
How am I supposed to back up a 100TB NAS, though?
By spending money. 100T is a quite a lot of data and big data sets cost money to properly maintain.
25GB and 50GB disks written at blistering 10MB/s in the age of 100MB/s Gigabit Internet connected to storage (S3, Backblaze, etc. etc.) means that networks have completely obsoleted Blu Rays.
I'm surprised they still found a use of these things. Flash drives are also so much cheaper, faster, and more convenient.
Oh well. I use memorex anyway
Is this just Sony's own production of consumer writable Blu-ray discs, or is it like, Sony preventing other manufactures from producing them as well?
Just their own. Other manufacturers are fine.
Good. Flash storage is everywhere now. Why go through an extra layer of proprietary hardware and DRM when you can have direct access to the video files which can be read on any platform?
