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Supply Chain

The Last Disc Defenders: Verbatim and I-O Data Vow to Keep Blu-ray Spinning

By Stefano April 12, 2026 5 min read

While the rest of Japan’s electronics industry has been quietly ghosting Blu-ray, two companies just doubled down on the format — and they’re not just talking about the discs anymore.

Verbatim Japan and I-O Data have expanded their joint commitment to keeping recordable Blu-ray alive in Japan, this time extending their pledge to cover drive hardware and components, not just media. The announcement comes as the market has shed most of its major players over the past 14 months, leaving the duo as one of the last names standing in a rapidly thinning field.

The who’s-out list reads like an electronics farewell tour:

  • Sony shipped its final domestic Blu-ray recorders in February, capping a business it had already wound down to near-zero.
  • Buffalo announced there would be no successors to its current lineup of portable USB Blu-ray writers.
  • Elecom posted termination notices for its external drives, with end-of-sale dates stretching into June 2026.
  • LG made its exit all the way back in 2024, having last launched a Blu-ray product in 2018.

That leaves Panasonic as the only remaining vertically integrated Japanese manufacturer of optical drives — and it’s already struggling to keep up. The company apologized in March after its DMR-ZR1 4K DIGA recorder was swamped with more orders than it could fill.

So why are Verbatim and I-O Data leaning in? They point to the warm reception of the BD Reco, a Windows-compatible external Blu-ray recorder that I-O Data released in February. The device “attracted a great deal of interest,” according to the companies’ joint announcement, reaffirming that the appetite for physical disc recording is still alive — if a lot quieter than it used to be.

The numbers confirm the long slide: domestic Blu-ray recorder shipments in Japan landed at around 620,000 units in 2025, a fraction of the 6.3 million peak recorded back in 2011. But for the companies willing to stick around, that’s still a market worth serving.

Looking ahead: With Panasonic overwhelmed and most rivals gone, Verbatim and I-O Data now have an unusually clear field. Whether niche demand is enough to sustain genuine product development — or whether this is more of a graceful holding pattern — is the real question worth watching.

S
Author
Stefano