Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cdubzzz 1521 days ago
Do you really think physical disc and media players for them will last long? I still cling to an old blu-ray player but every time I buy some discs it feels like I’m sifting through the ruins of a collapsed building (in some giant bin in the middle of a large retailer hallway). I also feel like I never see a single other person looking at or purchasing discs…
2 comments

> Do you really think physical disc and media players for them will last long?

Yes.

There are too many use cases for physical and immutable long-term offline storage for this niche to go unfilled, but the niche is too small (at present) to prompt the development of a replacement medium and format, so while I am sure that the materials and read/write hardware will continue to evolve (better data longevity guarantees, read/write speed, physical durability, etc.) the implementations will remain compatible, or at least the reading ones will.

The research suggests that M-DISC Blu-Rays should be fairly durable if not handled often.

I think the disc players are the weak link. I can definitely imagine them going away nigh-entirely in a decade or three.