I'm really rather cross that Panasonic has killed off its recordable Blu-ray disc. They&nbsp;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.&nbsp;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.&nbsp;The recent editing of lan Fleming and Roald Dahl has reminded us that physical media may often be the only way of preserving the artist's original intentions.&nbsp;Other digital purchases may cease to exist when servers are taken offline or licensing agreements lapse. Sony, for example, announced in 2022 that hundreds&nbsp;of movie titles people purchased through the PlayStation store would no longer be accessible for licensing reasons.
You'll have no such worries with a Blu-ray, making it practically the only way for movie enthusiasts to collect films in HD that won't go missing or become incomplete overnight. Blu-ray could stay as a valuable and vibrant niche, like vinyl.&nbsp;The only practical Blu-ray replacements in the short term are the SSD and memory stick. This has a bit of a bit-rot problem - if the memory isn't used it can lose its charge and disappear - but it may be the only option for movies in the future and at 8K.
Recording to USB from Freeview is possible but tricky. My Sony TV, for example, won't do it if you have YouView enabled, and even if you haven't you can only play files back on the TV that recorded them. BD-R is also a very useful backup&nbsp;medium for the home. Discs can have an estimated 50-year life and they're a great way of safely keeping reasonably large amounts of data that would be too expensive to store in the cloud.&nbsp;What else can you use for dependable physical backup? Sony has developed an optical-based high-capacity storage system called 'Archival Disc' but it's too expensive for mass home use. Another alternative is high-capacity magnetic tape in the Linear Tape Open (LTO) format, but Dell's cheapest drive is around ₹5,00,000 and an LTO9 18TB tape is about ₹12,700.
Some have high hopes for the molecule that contains human genetic information, DNA, which may well have the capacity to store huge quantities of data indefinitely. But it's way in the future.
Meanwhile, we should look to laser-etched silica glass as a Blu-ray replacement. 5D Optical discs developed by researchers at the University of Southampton offer fast and efficient optical storage that's 10,000 times denser than Blu-ray and with the prospect of millions of years of life, all on attractive glass discs that hold up to 500TB of data. And these discs could be very small. We could send off our archives to be copied onto tiny jewels, or buy films to keep on them. How useful, and delightful!

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

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{{magzter}} is the World's largest and fastest growing self-service, cross-platform digital newsstand with over 87 million users since its inception in 2011 and thousands of magazines and newspapers across 40+ categories and 60+ languages. Headquartered in New York, Magzter has its local presence in Amsterdam, London, Mexico City, Chennai, Mumbai, New Delhi, Bengaluru, Singapore, and will soon be expanding to other countries. Founded by global entrepreneurs, Girish Ramdas and Vijay Radhakrishnan in June 2011, Magzter enables magazine and newspaper publishers around the world to create and deliver digital editions of their titles to global consumers.