- Blu-ray shipments collapsed sharply as consumer habits shifted toward digital storage
- Major manufacturers are constantly abandoning Blu-ray hardware production
- Verbatim and IO Data continue to support Blu-ray supply despite industry exit
The consumer optical disc industry has been in steady decline for more than a decade, largely displaced by cloud storage, streaming platforms and on-demand digital distribution.
The contraction has reshaped hardware production priorities, with several companies moving away from recordable Blu-ray production in recent years.
According to JEITA, shipments of Blu-ray recorders fell dramatically by about 90% in Japan, moving from 6.3 million units in 2011 to 620,000 units in 2025.
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Market contraction and producer exit
Sony shipped its last domestic Blu-ray recorders in February, effectively ending a product line that had already been reduced to minimal quantities.
Buffalo’s Japanese arm announced that it would not produce successors to its current portable USB Blu-ray burners.
Elecom issued termination notices for its external drives last month, with expiration dates running into June this year.
LG exited the market back in 2024, after releasing a new Blu-ray product in 2018.
Despite this exodus of major manufacturers, Verbatim Japan and IO Data have expanded their joint commitment to stock recordable Blu-ray products on Japanese shelves.
The two companies stated that they would secure components and adapt production lines to continue developing new products and supplying the domestic market.
Last February, the pair issued a similar statement focusing on disc media after Sony confirmed it was closing its last domestic recordable Blu-ray factory.
The renewed commitment goes further by adding drive 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 keep up with orders for its DMR-ZR1 4K DIGA recorder and promised to expand production to meet demand.
This suggests that a niche but persistent customer base still values physical media for data preservation.
Before making the renewed promise, Verbatim Japan and IO Data had announced BD Reco, a Windows-compatible external Blu-ray drive that IO Data released in February this year.
In a statement, the company claims that the device “has attracted a lot of interest.”
“We have again recognized that the need to ‘record data I want to keep on a disk I have on hand’ still exists,” the company added.
Although Blu-ray discs serve a niche market, their practical limitations are still evident, especially since many users still rely on 25 GB single-layer discs despite the availability of higher-capacity options.
This limitation becomes more noticeable when dealing with large video files from modern devices, where storage requirements can quickly exceed this limit.
Multi-layer 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 in UHD formats, but it remains unclear whether this difference is enough to sustain wider demand in the long term.
Via Tom’s hardware
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