Missed the actual date by a couple of days, but in January 2006, the Blu Ray was officially revealed to the world at that year's Consumer Electronics Show; it launched to consumers a few months later.

The format remains in use to this day for both movies and games, despite the competition from digital/online media.

https://www.techspot.com/news/110810-blu-ray-20-optical-disc-refuses-fade-away.html

Happy Birthday Blu-Ray 😍

I still buy them on the regular and own well over a hundred of them, including the complete MCU film series in 4K Steelbook edition. My most recent purchase was Season 1 of Hazbin Hotel a couple of weeks ago.

Lol, disks. They used to be such a huge part of my life with playstation, music and movies.. and backing up data. I honestly cannot remember the last time I even saw a disk, much less purchased one. Probably 2012, because my Wii U came with a Mario game? Christ, that is a long time ago. My kids don't even know how to work a disk player.

The recent ones I bought were the Phoenician scheme and memoir of a snail. I still prefer the image and sound quality of blu-ray although I rarely watch blu-rays anymore :/


They made one huge mistake with blu-ray and that's making it less convenient than DVD. Slow load times, unskippable splash and warning screens, commercials before the menu..., unresponsive menus, no quick resume. (Or only works for some, not for most)

Streaming was going to take over from blu-ray anyway, but it would have had longer legs if it wasn't such a pain in the ass from inserting a disc to actually watching the content.

Blu-ray never ever got anywhere close to the popularity of DVD, sabotaging itself from the start with higher prices for less convenience vs DVD and streming arriving soon after which focused on nothing but convenience. For example how come blu-ray never got skip credits / opening theme for series. 

Anyway I've got many hundreds of them, maybe a thousand. Always nice to see that stable quality again and hear uncompressed sound, but streaming is simply more convenient. However now subscriptions are turning to ad supported plans, maybe blu-ray will have a little comeback / longer legs. 

Blu-ray never surpassed DVD as a format, just like 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray doesn't have a shot at surpassing DVD or Blu-ray.
VHS to DVD was a clear form factor change. We just keep getting discs.
Blu-ray is better than DVD in a lot of ways. But as @SvennoJ said there are still tons of unskippable splash and warning screens and sometimes longer loading times.
Way more Blu-rays are region-free, which is great. They are also more durable than DVDs.
Blu-ray is probably my overall favorite format because 4K UHD is overkill sometimes and often doesn't have special features on the 4K UHD disc.
Blu-ray helped Sony in the long-term but it nearly killed PS3 at first considering its high cost.

Ditching the pay-per-movie model that sustained VHS, DVD, and Blu-Ray and letting Netflix basically take over the distribution is the biggest mistake Hollywood ever made.

They should never have given Netflix shit to stream on their service and left them to die with no content.

What studios should have done 15 years ago is created a consortium with a unified store front where you could buy digital streaming versions of each movie for say $9.99 a pop (discounted down to $4-$5 for older titles and during sale periods). This would have allowed them to basically keep the same profit margin they were making off physical DVDs give or take.

Focusing on Blu-Ray instead of a digital distribution of movies was likely a mistake, but oh well. Can't do much about it now.

I was an HD-DVD guy back then and was pissed that Sony forced Blu-ray onto the public via the PS3. Still think it was a weird format, but at least there was something physical to own.

Oh man, I completely forgot about that.  I bought a HD-DVD attachment for my xbox.  Was that the 360?  It came with King Kong or something.  

Yup, I still have my HD-DVD add-on as well. But replaced the couple good HD-DVDs I had with Blu-ray.

Out of the gate HD-DVD had some advantages over blu-ray since the codecs for blu-ray weren't ready yet. But at least the better format won this time and quickly. 15/30 GB 36 mbps vs 25/50 GB 54 mbps. Yet at first you mostly had single layer Blu-rays with mpeg 2 encodings.

Unfortunately HVD (4 to 6 TB) never arrived, it would have been nice to have whole series on a single disc.