Sony will ship its final Blu-ray recorders this month — exit from Japanese market the end of an era for the segment

A Sony Blu-ray player — (Image credit: Sony)

Another rampart of the consumer optical media market has crumbled away. This week, Sony Corporation has drawn a line under its Blu-ray disk recorder business. Kyodo News reports that the final Sony-branded Blu-ray recorders will be shipped this month. Importantly, this unfortunate news will have few repercussions outside of the niche Japanese market, where these devices are hooked up in living rooms to record broadcast TV. Sony will continue to ship Blu-ray players “for the time being,” notes the source.

This news doesn’t catch anyone by surprise. Sony stopped manufacturing the recorders, as well as recordable discs, this time last year, so the operation has just been running on fumes. Moreover, the Sony recorders that are seeing the last shipments this month uniquely target the Japanese domestic TV recording market.

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Blu-ray players, movies, PC drives, and media are sticking around

If you are a Blu-ray media enthusiast, there is still no end in sight, though. Sony and others will continue to address the Blu-ray player market. Moreover, the Blu-ray media (movies, TV shows, etc) market appears to be niche but pretty stable. There’s no need to rush out, just yet, to get a backup player for when the manufacturing of the Blu-ray optical mechanisms ceases.

Blu-ray media users among HTPC enthusiasts shouldn’t be too concerned about Sony’s set-top recorder box withdrawal. Firms like Asus, LG, and Pioneer still seem to be making drives available in internal and external USB models. Blu-ray media is also still being produced by brands like Panasonic and Verbatim.

The Blu-ray optical drive/media format recently enjoyed its 20^th birthday. It was first announced for consumers at CES 2006, where it was enthusiastically supported by the majority of the big movie studios. That was just one year ahead of Netflix (founded in 1997) debuting its online streaming platform. In 2026, Netflix’s best quality UHD video streams run at around 16 Mbps, and are still therefore easily outgunned by the up to 100 Mbps video available to Blu-ray aficionados.

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Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.

9 Comments Comment from the forums

bit_user

The article said:
the Sony recorders that are seeing the last shipments this month uniquely target the Japanese domestic TV recording market.

Kyodo says that this particular recording market has finally been “snuffed out” due to the rise of streaming services.
I still record some ATSC 1.0 broadcasts via mplayer and a USB TV tuner device.

This produces .ts (MPEG-2 Transport Stream) files, which my blu-ray player can play off a disc and which my new HiSense laser projector can play via DLNA or via USB stick. Windows can also play them, if you download a free MPEG-2 codec from the MS store. And, of course, MPlayer and VLC can play them.

You can also do lossless editing via avidemux, if you're careful about how you configure it. That's a nice little video editor, BTW. It's a bit light on features, but gives you lots of low-level control.

I have yet to look into ATSC 3.0. None of my devices support that. Even a LG OLED TV I looked at, last year, still supported only ATSC 1.0.
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usertests

Blu-ray PC drives, players, and discs are expected to remain niche but stable markets.
Is there anything stable about the market for Blu-ray PC drives? They were never widespread like DVD drives are (you can buy a cheap, old OEM PC and get one integrated), and I think they've been mostly discontinued, and certain models that you can flash with "downgraded" firmware to read UHD discs are being hoarded.

https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19634
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bit_user

usertests said:
Is there anything stable about the market for Blu-ray PC drives? They were never widespread like DVD drives are (you can buy a cheap, old OEM PC and get one integrated),
Well, one difference is that PC software was never distributed on blu-ray, whereas there was a time when a lot of software came on DVD.
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DS426

Wow, hard to believe it's been 20 years for Blu-Ray. I still have a BD-RW drive in my desktop PC, though I haven't used it in years -- no optical at all actually. My wife gets by with an external DVD drive for old game discs and some work stuff, was the only option for that mini-ITX build.
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InfiniteWeatherMan

bit_user said:
I still record some ATSC 1.0 broadcasts via mplayer and a USB TV tuner device.

This produces .ts (MPEG-2 Transport Stream) files, which my blu-ray player can play off a disc and which my new HiSense laser projector can play via DLNA or via USB stick. Windows can also play them, if you download a free MPEG-2 codec from the MS store. And, of course, MPlayer and VLC can play them.

You can also do lossless editing via avidemux, if you're careful about how you configure it. That's a nice little video editor, BTW. It's a bit light on features, but gives you lots of low-level control.

I have yet to look into ATSC 3.0. None of my devices support that. Even a LG OLED TV I looked at, last year, still supported only ATSC 1.0.
Don't, because right now the DRM requirements are making those broadcasts unwatchable. I have a box that supports ATSC 3.0, and I can't even watch the broadcasts that I want to because the FCC blocked the supported box. Until the FCC figures out this DRM mess nobody is going to record anything, much less watch.
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soundtrek

My main worry is production of Window compatible BD drives ceases globally when those in my two PCs die. Not that I use them much to point of wear; mainly for occasional CD track ripping. And if want to play one of the very few Region B BD movies from my collection or rip it via makeMKV then I want to have the freedom to do so. Of course, consumer freedom is poison to streaming companies, which of course includes movie studio and content owner Sony, which now has more of stake in than marketing any hardware save for TVs-and even production of those they're spinning off jointly with TCL. I guess it all depends whether the BD format becomes open source for whoever to continue making BD drives. Bad it all looks very bad for collectors and users of physical media.
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InfiniteWeatherMan

soundtrek said:
My main worry is production of Window compatible BD drives ceases globally when those in my two PCs die. Not that I use them much to point of wear; mainly for occasional CD track ripping. And if want to play one of the very few Region B BD movies from my collection or rip it via makeMKV then I want to have the freedom to do so. Of course, consumer freedom is poison to streaming companies, which of course includes movie studio and content owner Sony, which now has more of stake in than marketing any hardware save for TVs-and even production of those they're spinning off jointly with TCL. I guess it all depends whether the BD format becomes open source for whoever to continue making BD drives. Bad it all looks very bad for collectors and users of physical media.
Totally understand. BD unfortunately had it time, and streaming seems to be King. I don't like this because we can't use the media if they lock it up. Hopefully that doesn't happen, but yea, if your BD players die, you won't be able to replace it unless you want to pay a high price because of scarcity. It won't happen immediately, but it will happen eventually...
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bit_user

InfiniteWeatherMan said:
Don't, because right now the DRM requirements are making those broadcasts unwatchable. I have a box that supports ATSC 3.0, and I can't even watch the broadcasts that I want to because the FCC blocked the supported box. Until the FCC figures out this DRM mess nobody is going to record anything, much less watch.
Heh, I remember when the ominous news of the dreaded "broadcast flag" broke, about 20 years ago. New HD receivers were supposed to respect the broadcast flag by refusing to record content where it was present, as well as I think sending any decoded version of the signal with HDCP (encryption) enabled.

There was some panic about this, and I bought the only PCI tuner card that supported Linux, for something like $200 (just a bit of profiteering, there). Then, there was some kind of course-reversal and the broadcast flag rules got scrapped.

I used that capture card for a while, but eventually it got flaky and I replaced it with a $35 USB tuner. I've actually gone through two USB tuners, but the second one has kept working for about a decade.
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nrschertz02

In the article it is incorrectly reported that Pioneer still manufactures optical drives for PC. Pioneer exited the PC optical drive market early last year.
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