Another milestone in one of the (formerly) biggest electronics giants on the planet’s ongoing retreat from physical media today, as Gizmodo reports (via Japanese retailer/blog Kunkoko) that Sony has announced that it apparently no longer intends to sell standalone Ultra HD/4K Blu-ray players (at least, in Japan). If you want a Sony player for your fancy 4K discs, pretty soon it sounds like you’ll have to just pick up a PlayStation 5—which is, of course, facing its own aspects of the physical media apocalypse at the moment.
Admittedly, the move to discontinue the company’s UBP-X700/K player (which at least some commentators are seeing as a likely prelude to a similar move in non-Japanese markets) doesn’t represent a complete abandonment of the disc-based battlefield just yet; Sony will continue to sell a single non-UHD Blu-ray player to consumers, along with one regular-old DVD player. But it still demonstrates how thoroughly a company once synonymous with pushing optical hardware forward is now disinterested in even being in the business, leaving Panasonic as the only major electronics brand still seriously invested in the game. The news comes about a year after Sony announced that it was giving up the ghost on the rewritable Blu-ray format, and three months after it announced it was giving up on physical discs for its video games. (Needless to say that the PlayStation 6 probably won’t be offering any kind of Blu-ray support, or any other kind of disc-based functionality at all, if and when it arrives in a year or two.)
The reasons why it’s bad for physical media to collapse—at the same time that streamers seem to be driving down quality while choking every dollar they can out of their limited pool of subscribers—have been well-litigated at this point, of course. (The Gizmodo piece notes, for instance, that even if you do have a PS5 to play your 4K discs on, it’s not as fully-featured as a standalone player—and that’s before we get into all the obvious good that comes from having ready access to the movies and shows you want to watch without having to worry about which license has been negotiated with who this month.) Sony, at least, pretty clearly doesn’t care, though: It’s getting out while the getting’s good, image quality and availability be damned.