While major manufacturers keep abandoning the Blu-ray market one by one, two Japanese companies just made it clear they’re not going anywhere. I-O Data and Verbatim Japan announced they are strengthening their partnership to continue supplying Blu-ray discs and drives in Japan, offering a much-needed lifeline to collectors, anime fans, and long-term storage users who still rely on physical media.
The announcement comes at a critical moment. In January 2025, Sony, one of the architects of the Blu-ray format itself, confirmed it was shutting down production of all recordable Blu-ray discs, MiniDiscs, and MiniDV cassettes, with no successor products planned. Then in February 2026, the company completed the shipment of its final Blu-ray recorders, ending a run that began when it launched the world’s first consumer BD recorder back in 2003.
Sony didn’t just make Blu-ray products, it helped create the format, winning the brutal format war against HD-DVD and defining the standard the entire industry still uses today. Its exit carries real symbolic weight.
But Sony wasn’t the only one heading for the exit. Pioneer left the PC optical drive market. LG discontinued its Blu-ray player lineup. Buffalo Japan announced it would stop manufacturing all three of its external Blu-ray drive models, with no replacements coming. Then Elecom, another major Japanese electronics supplier, revealed it will discontinue all nine external Blu-ray drives in its lineup as of June 30, 2026. The company even apologized publicly and advised fans to stock up on spare units while they still can.
The numbers behind these decisions aren’t hard to understand. According to data from Japan’s Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association, domestic Blu-ray recorder shipments peaked at 6.39 million units in 2011. By 2025, that figure had collapsed to just 620,000. Streaming, cloud storage, and built-in HDD recorders slowly ate away at the market over the course of a decade, and the bigger players decided it was no longer worth staying in the game.
Two companies step up when everyone else steps out
That’s exactly the gap I-O Data and Verbatim Japan are moving to fill. Their renewed commitment goes beyond just keeping existing stock on shelves. The two companies announced they will secure the necessary components, adjust their production lines, and actively develop new products tailored to Blu-ray users, both disc media and drive hardware. That last part matters, because with so many drive manufacturers exiting, hardware availability has quietly become the more urgent problem.
I-O Data serves as the sole domestic distributor of Verbatim-branded optical media in Japan. Verbatim, for its part, handles manufacturing and has committed to maintaining thorough quality control across its full lineup of CD-R, DVD-R, BD-R, and BD-R XL discs. Together, they’re positioning themselves as the primary safety net for a market that keeps losing suppliers.
The partnership already has a concrete product to show for it. I-O Data released the BD Reco earlier in 2026, a Windows-compatible external Blu-ray drive that, according to the companies, generated significant interest from users. That response confirmed something important for both brands: the need to physically record and store data on disc “continues to genuinely exist,” in their own words. As a result, they’ve committed to continuing development and improvement of their entire Blu-ray lineup going forward.
Verbatim also showed up to CES 2025 with something worth noticing, a new Slimline Blu-ray Writer capable of backing up 4K content to Ultra HD Blu-ray, bundled with Nero disc-burning software. That’s not the behavior of a brand in retreat. That’s a brand investing in the format.
There’s still a real audience for physical media, and here’s why
In Japan, the culture of recording TV shows and anime onto Blu-ray runs deep. It’s not a niche habit, it’s a widespread practice built over decades, and it doesn’t disappear overnight just because streaming exists. For a huge portion of Japanese consumers, having a personal physical archive of their favorite series is simply part of how they consume content. Knowing that Verbatim and I-O Data are committed to keeping that possible is genuinely reassuring news.
Beyond anime fans, there’s also the long-term storage crowd: businesses, archivists, photographers, and anyone who’s thought carefully about where their data will be in 20 years. Hard drives fail. Cloud services change their terms, raise prices, or simply shut down. A properly stored Blu-ray disc, on the other hand, doesn’t depend on a server, a subscription, or an internet connection. For that audience, optical media isn’t a nostalgic quirk, it’s a deliberate, rational choice.
And it’s worth remembering that Blu-ray never disappeared from mainstream hardware either. The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X both use Blu-ray discs for physical game releases, meaning millions of active users around the world are still engaging with the format every day. The format isn’t dying, it’s consolidating around the people who actually need it most.
Panasonic currently stands as the only remaining vertically integrated Japanese manufacturer of Blu-ray recorders, and even they’ve struggled to keep up with demand since rivals started exiting the market. Against that backdrop, the commitment from I-O Data and Verbatim Japan isn’t just welcome news, it might be exactly what keeps physical media viable in Japan for years to come.
Are you still rocking physical media or have you gone full streaming? Tell us in the comments, we want to know where you stand!