Another important step in the current withdrawal of one of the (formerly) largest electronics giants on the planet from physical media, as shown Gizmodo reports (via Japanese retailer/blog Kunkoko) that Sony announced that it apparently no longer plans to sell standalone Ultra HD/4K Blu-ray players (at least in Japan). If you want a Sony player for your fancy 4K discs, it will soon seem like you’ll just have to get a PlayStation 5 – which, of course, is currently facing its own aspects of the physical media apocalypse.
Certainly, the decision to abandon the company’s UBP-X700/K player (which at least some commentators see as a likely prelude to a similar move in non-Japanese markets) does not represent a change. complete abandoning the battlefield on disk for now; Sony will continue to sell a single non-UHD Blu-ray player to consumers, along with an older regular DVD player. But it further demonstrates how a company once synonymous with advancing optical hardware is now losing interest in even its business, leaving Panasonic as the only major electronics brand still seriously invested in gaming. The news comes about a year after Sony announced it was giving up the ghost on the rewritable Blu-ray format, and three months after announcing it was abandoning physical discs for its video games. (Needless to say, the PlayStation 6 probably won’t offer any type of Blu-ray support, or any other type of disc-based functionality, if and when it arrives in a year or two.)
The reasons Why It’s bad that physical media is collapsing – at the same time as streamers seem to be reducing quality while squeezing every dollar they can out of their limited pool of subscribers – has of course been the subject of a lot of litigation at this point. (THE Gizmodo piece notes, for example, that even if you TO DO If you have a PS5 to play your 4K discs, it’s not as fully featured as a standalone player – and that’s before you get into all the obvious good that comes from having easy access to the movies and shows you want to watch without having to worry about which license was negotiated with who this month.) Sony, at least, clearly doesn’t care: it’s releasing while things are going well, picture quality and availability be damned.
