Another rampart of the consumer optical media market has crumbled away. This week, Sony Corporation has drawn a line under its Blu-ray disk recorder business. Kyodo News reports that the final Sony-branded Blu-ray recorders will be shipped this month. Importantly, this unfortunate news will have few repercussions outside of the niche Japanese market, where these devices are hooked up in living rooms to record broadcast TV. Sony will continue to ship Blu-ray players “for the time being,” notes the source.
This news doesn’t catch anyone by surprise. Sony stopped manufacturing the recorders, as well as recordable discs, this time last year, so the operation has just been running on fumes. Moreover, the Sony recorders that are seeing the last shipments this month uniquely target the Japanese domestic TV recording market.
