With the rise of digital gaming platforms and streaming services, is there really a future for optical discs? Blu-ray Discs Are Holding Out, But For How Much Longer? Will Blu-ray discs be the last optical format ever, or will it be replaced by another?
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Blu-ray players are disappearing
In 2019, Samsung stopped producing its Blu-ray players, and finding a new player is getting harder and harder as time goes on. Also only a few ready-made desktop PCs or laptops are equipped with optical drives. So if you have a collection of Blu-ray discs to play, you don’t have many options to play them.
Unless you buy a current or previous generation Xbox or PlayStation console. Since Blu-ray discs are the standard format for console video games, discs will remain in production at least as long as these consoles are relevant.
Blu-ray is not dead (yet).
Although standalone players are on the decline, Blu-ray movies continue to be produced. They remain the only way for movie buffs to collect a copy of a movie to take home that won’t disappear overnight. While you can probably find most mainstream movies on any of the dominant streaming services, more obscure movies are only available through digital purchase or on disc. Digital purchases are not suitable for keeping a collection as their servers may eventually go offline. Sony, for example, announced in July 2022 that several films purchased through the PlayStation Store would disappear due to licensing deals.
It’s also easy to forget that Blu-ray technology only got an update in 2015 with the introduction of UHD 4K Blu-ray discs. At the time of writing, the largest Blu-ray disc is 128GB, although it’s the 100GB version that games and movies ship on.
Blu-ray discs offer some of the cheapest storage per GB, about as much as the cheapest hard drive storage, but without the mechanical complexity and associated failure rates.
While internet speeds are increasing rapidly, a 100GB Blu-ray disc is about as fast as gigabit fiber, much faster than most home internet connections worldwide. Typical 4K streams use up to 40Mbps at the high-end, but even then offer much more compressed video at a lower bitrate than Blu-ray.
Far from becoming obsolete, Blu-ray discs still play an important role in storage as long as solid state drive (SSD) technology remains small and expensive and internet connection speeds are so much slower than that Installing something from a disc.
There are bigger discs out there
Believe it or not, there was actually a Blu-ray sequel in development. Known as HVD or Holographic Versatile Disc, it would offer capacities up to 6TB. This was in development as early as 2010, but market conditions and the eventual bankruptcy of the company responsible for developing the HVD technology ended the project.
Although this commercial successor never became an actual product, that doesn’t mean nobody is working on more advanced optical discs. Optical discs, if made from the right material, can theoretically last well over a century. This makes them desirable for archival purposes. In 2018, scientists announced that they had developed a 10TB optical disc with a theoretical lifetime of 600 years.
In 2020, Sony (who developed Blu-ray) announced theirs Third generation optical storage system. These server-based optical devices use disc cartridges that store 5.5 TB each and offer read speeds of up to 3 Gbps and write speeds of 1.5 Gbps. Of course, there’s still plenty of scope to make something much bigger and faster than Blu-ray discs in the commercial market.
TIED TOGETHER: What are read/write speeds and why are they important?
8K movies and bigger games are coming
While Blu-ray can “only” be as fast as gigabit fiber optics, media size does not stand still either. At some point in the future, 8K film media will be available and this is four times the resolution compared to 4K, which in turn is four times that of 1080p film material. Streaming this content is challenging and downloading it to a local drive would be a hassle.
Video games are getting bigger too, and while it’s possible to simply ship a game on multiple discs, a new optical media standard with much faster read speeds could make it possible to only partially install a game on the SSD and then quickly load subsequent sections of the game game in the background while you play.
TIED TOGETHER: What 8K content is actually available?
Will there be other optical discs?
While we believe that optical discs still have a future role in the consumer world, whether we actually see one depends on several factors.
First, someone needs to develop a disc that offers clear advantages over the alternatives that will attract investors. Second, confidence in the future of digital-only content needs to come down from the peak of the current hype. Loss of access to content and service outages can make people think twice about fully investing in a world without offline discs. Third, solid-state memories would have to remain too expensive in comparison.
We believe that the last factor is perhaps the least true. Solid state memory is benefiting from the same exponential increase in performance and density as other semiconductor technologies. SSDs suffer from “bit rot,” in which the electrical charges representing data dissipate over time if the disc isn’t powered on, but as long as they’re powered on every few years, they should last as long as the typical user needs you. When solid-state storage becomes cheap enough, movies and games may ship in a read-only cartridge format, or simply in future flash memory connected via a USB port.
The best SSDs for gaming in 2023 
Samsung 980 Pro
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Crucial P3
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XPG GAMMIX S70
Corsair MP600 PRO XT
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WD_BLACK SN850
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