As streaming and downloadable media increase their dominance, Blu-ray players are being discontinued across the industry, which means that sooner or later you won’t find any players on the shelf should your current one give up the ghost. So what now?
In December 2024, LG announced that it would be ceasing production of Blu-ray players, joining Samsung and Oppo who both left the market about half a decade earlier.
LG was one of the last great holdouts making players, but now only Sony and Panasonic are left, and while having fewer players to share the market makes it more viable for them to stay in for a while, I suspect it’s only a matter of time before the remaining big brands pull the plug.
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So there’s no reason to rush out and do something financially inadvisable. Instead, take this as a medium-term warning that those of us who like collecting media are on notice. If you want your disc library to remain playable for as long as possible, you’ll have to do something about it soon.
DVD players are still out there in the wild, I think Blu-ray players have a lot of time left
In Australia, I’d actually expect DVD players to be supported by the major manufacturers longer than Bluray players. DVD is the dominant video format and you can find shows and movies still being repressed on DVD a decade after the limited Bluray run sold out. Some stuff doesn’t even get a Bluray release locally. However, I am becoming more optimistic about this as Via Vision is starting to tackle stuff that has long been neglected on Bluray here.