Been seeing more pieces lately arguing the PS6 won't have a disc drive at all, following on from the PS5 Pro going digital-only (the drive's an optional add-on there too). If that holds, it quietly removes what's probably still the single most common way regular households play 4K UHD Blu-rays - a lot of people who own discs aren't buying a dedicated home theater player for them, they're just using whatever console is already sitting under the TV.
Zoom out a bit and the pattern's been building for a while: Samsung was out of the disc player business years ago, LG stepped away from making its own Blu-ray and 4K UHD players too. That leaves Sony and Panasonic as basically the last manufacturers still making standalone units, and if console makers follow Sony's own lead on PlayStation, the pool of people who even want a player shrinks further - which is usually how you end up with fewer models and higher prices on what's left, rather than a sudden total disappearance.
I don't think physical 4K discs vanish outright - there's still a real collector and AV-enthusiast base that cares about bitrate and not having a studio quietly re-encode something into a worse stream five years down the line - but "the player that happens to already be in your living room" quietly going away is a bigger deal for average adoption than people give it credit for. That's the part that actually shrinks the overall market, not disc sales on their own.
If you're still buying physical UHDs, curious whether you're already on a dedicated player or have just been riding a console's drive without really thinking about it - because if it's the latter, now's probably the moment to decide whether you want a standalone one before the remaining options thin out further.
Zoom out a bit and the pattern's been building for a while: Samsung was out of the disc player business years ago, LG stepped away from making its own Blu-ray and 4K UHD players too. That leaves Sony and Panasonic as basically the last manufacturers still making standalone units, and if console makers follow Sony's own lead on PlayStation, the pool of people who even want a player shrinks further - which is usually how you end up with fewer models and higher prices on what's left, rather than a sudden total disappearance.
I don't think physical 4K discs vanish outright - there's still a real collector and AV-enthusiast base that cares about bitrate and not having a studio quietly re-encode something into a worse stream five years down the line - but "the player that happens to already be in your living room" quietly going away is a bigger deal for average adoption than people give it credit for. That's the part that actually shrinks the overall market, not disc sales on their own.
If you're still buying physical UHDs, curious whether you're already on a dedicated player or have just been riding a console's drive without really thinking about it - because if it's the latter, now's probably the moment to decide whether you want a standalone one before the remaining options thin out further.