- Blu-ray shipments fell sharply as consumer habits shifted to digital storage
- Major manufacturers are gradually abandoning the production of Blu-ray material
- Verbatim and IO Data continue to support Blu-ray supply despite industry releases
The consumer optical disc industry has been in steady decline for more than a decade, largely supplanted by cloud storage, streaming platforms and on-demand digital distribution.
This contraction has reshaped hardware manufacturing priorities, with several companies abandoning production of recordable Blu-ray discs in recent years.
According to JEITA, shipments of Blu-ray recorders have fallen dramatically by around 90% in Japan, from 6.3 million units in 2011 to 620,000 units in 2025.
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Market contraction and manufacturer exits
Sony shipped its last Blu-ray recorders domestically in February, ending a product line already reduced to minimal volumes.
The Japanese branch in Buffalo has announced that it will not produce successors to its current portable USB Blu-ray burners.
Elecom issued termination notices for its external drives last month, with end-of-sale dates running through June of this year.
LG exited the market in 2024, having last launched a new Blu-ray product in 2018.
Despite this exodus of major manufacturers, Verbatim Japan and IO Data have expanded their joint commitment to keeping recordable Blu-ray products on Japanese shelves.
The two companies said they would secure components and adjust production lines to continue developing new products and supplying the domestic market.
In February last year, the two issued a similar statement focused on disc media after Sony confirmed the closure of its last domestic recordable Blu-ray disc factory.
The renewed commitment goes further by adding workout components and products to the scope of the partnership.
Currently, Panasonic is the only vertically integrated Japanese manufacturer still producing Blu-ray TV recorders.
The company apologized in March for its inability to fulfill orders for its DMR-ZR1 4K DIGA recorder and promised to increase production to meet demand.
This suggests that a niche but persistent customer base still values physical media for data preservation.
Before renewing their commitment, Verbatim Japan and IO Data announced the BD Reco, a Windows-compatible external Blu-ray player that IO Data launched in February this year.
In a statement, the company says the device “has generated a lot of interest.”
“We have once again recognized that the need to ‘save the data I want to keep on a disk I have on hand’ continues to actually exist,” the company added.
Although Blu-ray discs are a niche market, their practical limitations remain evident, especially since many users still use 25 GB single-layer discs despite the availability of higher capacity options.
This constraint becomes more visible when managing large video files from modern devices, where storage requirements can quickly exceed this limit.
Multi-layered formats exist, although concerns about cost and reliability persist for some users, which may limit wider adoption.
Blu-ray still appears to offer higher video and audio quality than many streaming services, especially UHD formats, but whether that difference is enough to support broader demand in the long term remains to be seen.
Via Tom’s material
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