digital obsolescence Will Blu-ray disc drives be produced by 2050? (and some thoughts on digital obsolescence)

[Ertio]

Technically, optical discs are the most reliable archival media since they don't have the points of failure that other storage media has, a head crash or controller failure. Optical discs are separate from the drive, so a defective drive can be replaced. But there is a different risk factor. Not a problem with the discs themselves, but external support.

 

In the mid-2000s, we have seen how quick optical drive vendors can drop a format once it is considered "obsolete". Today's optical drives can not read data from HD DVD. If optical drive manufacturers can simply cut off HD DVD support, why wouldn't they cut off Blu-ray once that is considered "obsolete"?

 

This poses a risk of digital obsolescence, which could make data inaccessible in future.

 

Ideally, drive vendors would have added support for both HD DVD and Blu-ray, like they did with DVD+R and DVD-R. However, DVD-R was already widely established at the time DVD+R was released, so DVD-R did co-exist with DVD+R rather than getting replaced, where as HD DVD and Blu-ray entered the race just months apart. HD DVD had a three-month headstart, starting in March 2006.

 

For the same reason, CDs were not suddenly discontinued when the "next big thing", the DVD, was released. Disc drives retained backwards compatibility because almost everyone still owned CDs, mainly for audio because CD quality was already sufficient for the human hearing capability. There is not much that could be improved because audio is a far simpler technology than video, where as the original video formats (VCD and DVD) were well below the human viewing ability, so we have 4K Blu-ray and streaming today.

 

The reason HD DVD had no chance of outselling Blu-ray was its lower capacity of 15 GB, a whopping 10 fewer GB than Blu-ray. Capacity is the primary selling point of storage media, even though HD DVD had some secondary benefits: the lack of region locking, the existence of HD DVD-RAM (no BD-RAM counterpart exists) and a more robust centered data layer. But the average consumer does not understand those anyway, so these benefits could not be marketed as a selling point to the consumerist masses.

 

Perhaps because there was a competition, each format was forced into becoming more consumer-friendly, so HD DVD was in effect a launch pad for Blu-ray. HD DVD forced Blu-ray to become a better format, so we have to thank HD DVD for making Blu-ray better. Without competition from HD DVD, the developers of Blu-ray would have had less of an incentive to make Blu-ray more appealing to users.

 

Let me know what you think, will the optical drives of 2050 still be Blu-ray compatible?

 

[I hereby release this text under the Creative Commons Share-Alike Attribution 4.0 license.]

[Millios]

I'd say yeah at least for blu rays since for many its like a collectors edition for movies or shows where you cna get exclusive goodies and extra content.

Case and point is the Jujutsu Kaisen s2 bluray version where you got extended fights and episodes, new scenes, better animation etc etc.

While i dont think every media will keep it many will like anime and movies cause they've proven that they make money and good money at that especially since they have many ways to make it better for lil to no money compared to what they'll make from it .

Shows might drop it due to streaming tho

[anirudthelinuxwIzard]

I’m gonna say yes because floppy drives are still made today.

[manikyath]

i mean.. the premise of trying to look ahead 25 years in tech is already flawed to begin with.

 

why would we even assume bluray wont be replaced as a format by something else in that timeframe? these's multiple startups claiming they're working on the next big optical drive format.

[da na]

Doesn't matter, you can buy optical drives from twenty-five years ago today so why wouldn't that be the case in 2050? And just like with tape transports and floppy mechanisms, older CD transports are usually a great deal better than what's made today. 

[Nayr438]

  1 hour ago, Ertio said:

Not a problem with the discs themselves

I would like to add that they do suffer from Disc Rot. I actually have quite a few of these.

 

So will BD still be around in 2050 in the same way it is now? I find it unlikely.

• Consumer Demand is Dropping
• It's just something else taking up physical space.
• Streaming Content has pretty much become the norm where even new releases are expected to hit one of these platforms before they ever reach physical media.
• Streaming is overall cheaper for the average person.
  • I spend $20 to $30 USD for a Movie and $30 to $100+ for a TV Series. If you compare that to the cost of a subscription, it honestly doesn't make a ton of sense for most people. So maybe 2 TV Series and Maybe 15 movies would come about to about a year of streaming where I would be able to consume much more content. Sure I own that media now and I can re-watch it whenever, but most people will probably watch it once or twice and be done with it.
• Companies keep pushing for the whole you own nothing nonsense.

You also expect optical media to be available at all in 2050 in the consumer market. I suspect it will stick around just as CD and DVD has, but I would expect it to stick around for legacy reasons. Outside of that id only expect to see advancements in the data center space such as the 125TB AIE-DDPR Disc, something that would have little to no demand outside of this space and likely be out of reach in terms of cost for consumers.

 

The idea that you can buy physical media is something I believe will die out all together. Companies want it and most consumers likely don't care.

 

[da na]

  57 minutes ago, anirudthelinuxwIzard said:

I’m gonna say yes because floppy drives are still made today.

Well akshually  they aren't really. From what I've seen, "New" USB floppy drives 80% of the time use new-old-stock laptop drive mechanisms from the 90s and 00s, evident from the date codes and the fact that the off-brand cheapo drives from Amazon have name brand mechanisms inside, from brands like Sony, Teac, etc.

[da na]

  1 hour ago, Ertio said:

For the same reason, CDs were not suddenly discontinued when the "next big thing", the DVD, was released. 

CDs and DVDs use the same laser diode, just different wavelengths so it cost manufacturers next to nothing to implement CD compatibility in DVD drives. That is not the case with Blu-Ray, which uses an entirely different laser. Blu-Ray drives wouldn't be able to play DVDs if they did not have two lasers - one for DVD/CD and one for BD. But when BD was new in '09, people still needed CDs/DVDs. 

So perhaps the optical drives of the future (if those even exist, let's face it) might have three lasers but that would be ludicrous. 

[Ertio]

  36 minutes ago, Nayr438 said:

I would like to add that they do suffer from Disc Rot. I actually have quite a few of these.

Which brand of media and how old are those discs?

High quality media should last at least several decades.

I have 20 year old recordable CDs and DVDs that are still readable.

 

Disc rot is still better than a HDD head crash because a head crash is a total loss. Optical discs fail slowly, while hard drives and SSDs fail suddenly.

 

  36 minutes ago, Nayr438 said:

The idea that you can buy physical media is something I believe will die out all together. Companies want it and most consumers likely don't care.

This would be a nightmare because it takes away control from the individual.

 

I am not against cloud storage, but it is not a replacement for local storage because your data is at the mercy of the cloud storage provider. If you upload something they don't like, they might delete it or terminate your account altogether.

 

As usual, the average consumer will only care by the time it is too late.

[Ertio]

  25 minutes ago, da na said:

That is not the case with Blu-Ray, which uses an entirely different laser. Blu-Ray drives wouldn't be able to play DVDs if they did not have two lasers - one for DVD/CD and one for BD. But when BD was new in '09, people still needed CDs/DVDs.

HD DVDs also used blue lasers, so implementing HD DVD support into a Blu-ray drive would have been trivial for drive vendors. It would probably not have required and hardware changes, only firmware.