The announcement isn't a surprise. Sony said in a 2024 interview that it would gradually end development and production of recordable Blu-ray discs and other optical disc...
Modern encoding formats can also do a lot better quality at a lower bitrate than Blu-ray, and do dynamic bitrate depending on the amount of change in a scene.
Like you said, most people just don’t care. The quality is good enough.
UHD bluray uses H.265. That’s one of the best codecs available right now. AV1 can do a bit better for certain content, but it’s not a huge difference. Basically nothing supports H.266 yet and AV2 is still in development.
Modern encoding formats can also do a lot better quality at a lower bitrate than Blu-ray, and do dynamic bitrate depending on the amount of change in a scene.
Like you said, most people just don’t care. The quality is good enough.
UHD bluray uses H.265. That’s one of the best codecs available right now. AV1 can do a bit better for certain content, but it’s not a huge difference. Basically nothing supports H.266 yet and AV2 is still in development.