Welp… There goes physical media…
It’s just one company, it’s not all the Blu-ray production stopping. I think the last time I bought any Sony recordable media was CD-Rs for my MP3 CD player in the mid 00s.
They do not own it, they did co-develop it. They’ve never owned it outright.
I guess hard drives and SSDs don’t count as physical somehow?
Even on a streaming service, the files are stored physically somewhere.
All media is still, technically, physical media.
Even when you stream it locally and don’t have access to the file itself, it physically lives in your RAM for the duration of the stream.
it physically lives in your RAM for the duration of the stream.
It physically lives encrypted in your RAM and only temporarily. Remember TPM exists.
Still there for the duration. Being encrypted just makes it akin to being inside a locked box. Being in RAM is like it being transferred in an escrow service.
storing a movie in RAM does not count as having a physical copy of the movie. While RAM is a form of physical media, the data stored in RAM is volatile and temporary. A physical copy of a movie typically refers to a more permanent and tangible form of storage, such as on a hard drive, SSD, USB flash drive, CD, DVD, or Blu-ray disc.
hard drives and SSDs don’t count as physical
When was the last time you walked into any store and bought a feature length film or tv show on hard drive or SSD?
Even on a streaming service, the files are stored physically somewhere.
What is your plan when the licence agreement for your favorite series expires on your chosen streaming service and no other streaming service picks up the show?
All media is still, technically, physical media
No one is arguing this. You’re making the strawman arguement. The not-so-subtle undertone of the article is clear.
Quoting the article:
The planned job cuts come amid a decline in demand for traditional storage formats such as Blu-ray discs, with streaming services now the norm.
…
The electronics and entertainment conglomerate will also gradually cease production of optical disc storage media products, including Blu-ray discs, according to the sources.
You will not be allowed to legally own tv shows or films and you should learn to like it. As I can tell from many of the other comments here, not many of us are fans of that idea.
This isn’t a hill I care enough to die on.
I’ve never bought a series in any format. It’s always been piracy and for at least the last 5 years catch and release.
What I mean is, I don’t want to keep series in any case.
That said, now I think about it, if I didn’t pirate everything then keeping copies of what I’d paid for world feel important
I always preferred the rips fork Blu rays though. They had the highest quality video and audio and stuff. This sucks so much =(
EDIT: I just read someone else’s comment that although they developed it they don’t own it outright so that makes me feel a little better that hopefully other people can still make them.
How do SSDs and HDDs compare to optical disks in terms of stability in storage? SSD bits can lose charge over time until a lot of 1s read as 0s, right?
SSDs are pretty pricey for video. I use HDDs, mirrored. For some uses I put a SSD caching layer on top to speed up frequent R/W. Using only LVM, no fancy RAID hardware or anything.
I upgraded my datahoarding server to a pair of 18TB hard drives on ZFS with mirroring a little while back. It’ll be several years before I need to upgrade again, but I expect that when I do, SSDs will be cheap enough to go that route.
Already have a 10Gbps fiber connection to that server, so the hard drives are the bottleneck.
Commercially pressed discs don’t last forever, but longer than burnable discs. IIRC, they used to say 50 years for CDs, but in practice, it was a lot less. More like 20 or 30 if you store and handle them nicely. Easily less than 10 if you don’t.
Hard drives go bad over time; I don’t like trusting spinning platters much over 7 years. They can be OK, but they can suddenly stop working whenever.
SSDs are about the same as spinning platters.
I think we are talking about archival storage rather than storage in use. In which case hard drives can last decades.
Damn. I was just starting to rebuild my physical catalog so I could get away from streaming.
Keep doing it. Especially niche titles.
You think I can find tv shows like greg the bunny, or clerks the animated series? And then TV shows start retroactively saying whats ok to show and whats not. Then pulling the episodes from streaming.
Or maybe the rights run out, and no other streaming picks it up.
I’ll be sure to buy extras, since it’s clear this is yet another push towards the consumer market not deserving to own their media.
Apparently “recordable media” here means the kind you can record on at home, e.g. CD-R, DVD-R.
Ah! Yes. Hm. Well then . . . where do distributors get theirs from? Not Sony, presumably?
i can’t even remember the last time i saw an optical disc. it must be several years.
They’re a very common form of personal backup. A few discs and an USB writer and you get a very long lasting medium for passwords, personal files, family photos etc.
Can also archive multimedia of course, the smallest discs are 25 GB and can pack a few films, a season of a series, or a lot of music.
i guess, but they’re not great for backup. Eps. R/RW optical media doesn’t last that long (5-10 years) and is easily damaged. You’d be better off with tape for long-term storage. or an M-Disk or some similar magnetic backup solution.
M-Discs had merit in the DVD era. It’s a common refrain of those who don’t know the intricacies and read a wired article years ago to claim they mean anything in the Blu-ray era. They don’t.
Standard Blu-ray Discs have all the technologies that supposedly make m-discs so long lasting and as far as media that isn’t continuously updated and hashed from live storage medium to live storage medium (cold, archival storage unpowered) they are about as good as you’ll get.
They are much tougher than DVDs. Of course a variety of things go into how long a disc remains readable and without damage to data including luck with regards to no impurities in the batch. Even m-disc themselves based their longest claims off storage in ideal situations like an inactive salt mine (commonly used for archives by governments). Kept out of sun, away from extreme heat (including baking in uninsulated 120 degree F heat all summer year after year), away from high humidity and away from UV exposure to the data side of the disc as well as scratches and such and they should last a quarter to half a century, some more.
In the Blu-ray era m-discs are just an overly expensive brand.
optical media doesn’t last that long (5-10 years) and is easily damaged
I beg to differ. I’ve been backing things up to optical for 25 years now with minimal issues. CDs could be easily scratched but it hasn’t been the case for DVD and BR.
M-DISK uses in-organic substances that make the discs mostly immune to exposure but it’s a more recent invention. Proper storage and handling still goes a long way towards protecting discs even if they’re not in-organic.
Found a small part of the problem.
Physical media is dying because the majority of people think just as short sighted as businesses do. Businesses think in short term thoughts like quarters. They do so because investers want immediate return.
But why would you as a person not want physical media??? I literally bought a George Carlin dvd of one of his HBO specials 2 days ago. It was traded into a local resale shop as “used”. It was brand new, because even though the plastic wrap was gone, the adhesive label at the top was still unbroken. Brand new dvd. $3.
I don’t want physical media because it’s a liability. It can get lost or destroyed very very easily, especially optical media.
Digital copies are portable, I can data hoard them, and, worst case, I can just re-download it.
It’s very easy to make digital copies of physical media. The resulting copy is likely to be as high quality as you can find, and as portable as any digital copy can be. Pop it in a folder and point Jellyfin at it, and it’s available anywhere.
It’s also the easiest legal way to get a good digital copy.
Most people don’t know how to switch between inputs on their TVs or have gotten rid of their DVD or BluRay players at this point.
They’re using the built in streaming apps or they’ve plugged a Roku in where the cable box used to go.
dont know why youre being downvoted, this is completely true. The majority of people favour the convenience that streaming has represented, and TVs have been designed to turn on showing a shiny netflix icon instead of “Composite II” for like a decade now.
Yes, while consumers have been sold a double-edged sword/lie - the streaming companies were obviously never going to market their platforms by saying “one downside of streaming is we can take away content whenever we like”.
The average person with a bluray collection is going to be much more aware of the pros and cons of the formats - I’d be willing to guess most peoples family “collections” are still on DVD.
For me, physical media takes up more space. It’s a good thing and a bad thing. It takes up more space which means I need to have more space, but it’s also cool having the boxes and box art etc. Ultimately, as long as I own my media and it’s physically accessible to me (like located on my hard drive), then I am happy with that ownership and don’t have to worry about it being taken away from me. Also, physical media can be damaged which means it’s unusable entirely. With a proper RAID setup and backups, digital media can outlast physical media.
Blu-rays do not actually take up this much space: On a 1TB drive you can store about 10-12 4K movies. You need a backup and you need a second drive for your Raid setup. This takes up quiet a lot of space too.
Besides that: storing the movies on a Raid system is a lot more expensive. If I’d rip all of my blu-rays to a digital copy, I’d need like 12 TB of storage. In a raid setup with backup, that’s quiet expensive!
I also don’t care to look
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I quit optical media around 03. Haven’t even owned anything with an optical drive for nearly a decade.
