Electronics giant LG has dealt a damaging blow to the Blu-ray format by announcing that the company will no longer develop and manufacture Blu-ray players. This development is a long time coming, with its most recently released players, the UBK90 and UBK80, seeing rollout in 2018. Still, this indicates another optical space major player opting out of support for the disks.
Formerly acting as a king of media storage and transfers, optical media as a whole has had a storied life full of competition and evolution. As it now stands in the 2020s, optical media as a whole is on a significant downturn, leading to questions about its ultimate fate. Could optical media go the way of the floppy disk, or does the medium have enough pull to maintain a position in ongoing use?
What Caused the Decline of Optical?
Two main avenues continue to contribute to the decline of optical drive and disk usage. The first is the move away from optical media in computing platforms. For around two decades, optical drives were a must in home computers and laptops. Even older CDs offered several hundred times the storage capacity of floppy disks, so they were a perfect fit for passing large files between systems.
Over time, optical drives with CDs, DVDs, and Blu-rays were usurped by flash drives. While many earlier flash drives didn’t possess the storage capacity of optical disks, they were much faster, much smaller, and could be inserted easily into any USB drive. Most users weren’t transferring larger files anyway, unless those files were video or music-related.
Here we enter the second point of the optical disk and drive decline, the rise of streaming services. By connecting to increasingly ubiquitous high-speed internet both in our homes and on the go, real-time loading of media became possible. Instead of having to carry around CDs, DVDs, or Blu-rays, we could find what we wanted on demand, or just keep it already stored on increasingly larger internet drives.
Optical drives take up space in computer systems, optical disks can be prone to damage and are inconvenient, so naturally their use would slow. It hasn’t ceased entirely, however, and unlike the floppy disk, these systems are unlikely to vanish completely, at least anytime soon.
Form, Function, and Collectivity
As great as streaming can be, it’s not a perfect system, and it’s not a method that everybody prefers. There are limitations to streaming that can hold it back, and this creates a disconnect where some prefer optical media over streamed media. This isn’t unique to this part of the entertainment or tech world either, with similar examples found in iGaming.
Online casinos that offer special features like free spins and no deposit bonuses have seen considerable success in the internet age. Services like 21 Casino and PlayGrand provide promotions physical casinos can’t, like no deposit bonuses, while also offering more convenience than brick-and-mortar establishments can. Like streaming services, these are also available on a range of platforms, yet they don’t remove the desire for traditional offline casinos. Rather, this is an instance where the two areas complement each other, and the same is true for optical media and streaming.
For a start, streaming services can’t offer every piece of music, show, or movie at all times. Licensing agreements mean that you don’t really own anything, you’re just renting. Streaming services also tend to offer just the end product, which is great, but sometimes the audience might want more.
With a DVD or Blu-ray, you actually own what you pay for. As long as you take care of it, the media will last. Optical media also tends to offer special features and behind-the-scenes content, which streaming lacks. Combined with collectible editions for major fans, there are some key highly desirable parts of optical media collections that streaming services can never match. Again, each can be preferable at different times and to different users.
There is a push from big media companies to go entirely digital, where they can keep a firmer grip on their properties, eliminate the second-hand market, and dictate rules more in their favor. This is antithetical to the shared setup we currently enjoy, and it’s a future many hope never comes to pass. While optical is in decline, it’s still far too important to ever do away with completely, unless somebody could think of an equally beneficial replacement. Moves like LG’s might signal a contraction in the market, but as long as fans fight for what optical offers, we should be safe from the downgrade a streaming-only future represents.
