It looks like writable optical disk media (CD, DVD, BD) just aren’t selling like they used to. This especially makes for sad news for writeable Blu-ray discs. For quite some time, Blu-ray has provided a more affordable means of storing data when compared to storing it on physical hard drives.
A single 50-pack of basic BD-R discs gains a user over a terabyte of writable (or re-writable, if using BD-RW/BD-RE) storage. This was a major win when it came to the price of hard drives when BD-R media was in its heyday. Of course, this only lasted until the capacity of drives started overshadowing these discs and prices started coming down.
Due to a lack of sales, Sony has decided to start shutting things down on the consumer side. As it just isn’t profitable enough to continue manufacturing the media. Sony will continue providing inventory to business partners, including the movie and video game industries, so that related products will continue to be available for now.
In the future, the company will move further to end all distribution of optical discs when it has determined that even business to business relationships are no longer profitable enough to sustain production. When this happens, things like movies and video games will likely all be in the cloud since the related companies have been pushing for that for quite some time now. Which, for them, would greatly increase profit margins while having complete control over ownership of the media (vs consumers physically owning anything).
This means that the price of CD, DVD, and BDR media will likely begin to rise soon as availability begins to thin out and stores realize they can make a little extra profit for any left-over demand for it all. So if you are a fan of writable discs, this would be the time to invest into a little more inventory while it is still reasonable (or move on to something new).
