Don't kill off the BD-R... yet

Jon Bentley laments the demise of the recordable Blu-ray – and wonders which state-of-the-art storage medium will take its place

I’m really rather cross that Panasonic has killed off its recordable Blu-ray disc. They stopped producing them in February, citing falling demand for the discs, which they’d started making back in 2006.

You might be surprised that I’m angry about the demise of what might seem old, clunky and largely irrelevant technology. Today we have the cloud and streaming media available anytime, anywhere in high definition. Surely the tech’s ripe for retirement anyway?

The problem is that, despite their drawbacks, Blu-ray discs are still very good at a number of tasks for which there’s no real replacement. Take physical media for films and TV. Sales of movies on Blu-rays and DVD may be nosediving, but we’ve seen how content gatekeepers have started to change content they feel might be offensive in some way. The recent editing of Ian Fleming and Roald Dahl has reminded us that physical media may often be the only way of preserving the artist’s original intentions.