Sony stops production of Blu-ray recordable cassettes, MiniDiscs and MiniDV

Sony is ending production of Blu-ray, MiniDisc and MD Data recordable discs, along with MiniDV cassettes, the company announced. Last year, Sony said that gradually end manufacturing of recordable optical media at its Tagajo City plant due to low sales. Now, production will stop permanently next month and “there will be no successor models,” according to the Japanese website.

In the announcement, Sony referred to “Blu-ray Disc media,” meaning recordable media onlynot Blu-ray discs used to distribute movies (Engadget asked Sony to confirm that it is only stopping production of recordable optical discs). Sony currently offers 11 products in the recordable category, ranging from 25GB to 128GB, in both R (write once) and RE (write multiple times).

While Sony is ceasing production of recordable Blu-ray discs, they are still available from Verbatim and possibly others. MiniDiscs can be hard to come by, however, as Sony was one of the few manufacturers left, so you may want to stock up while they’re still on sale.

MiniDisc, used primarily for audio recording, has seen some resurgence among audiophiles due in part to the tactile experience compared to streaming. It was widely used by professionals as it supports live recording and still has a presence in studios because a large amount of content has been archived in that format. (Fun fact: the character Neo in The matrix stores its ill-begotten goods, whatever they may be, on minidisks.)

Recordable Blu-rays and other optical media, once popular for movie compilation and file archiving, were effectively eliminated by streaming services, cheap memory, and cloud storage. All of the formats that Sony killed off have been around for decades: BD-RE arrived in 2002, MiniDisc in 1992, MD Data in 1993, and MiniDV cassettes, used primarily for video production, which first appeared in 1995.