Blu-ray is an optical disc storage medium which was designed to supersede the DVD format. Blu-ray discs are the same size as both DVDs and CDs, but can contain up to 25GB per layer. Thus a dual-layer Blu-ray disc can hold over ten times more than a conventional DVD and almost one hundred times more data than a CD.

Consumers were slow to embrace Blu-ray technology as a showdown between Sony’s Blu-ray format and Toshiba’s HD-DVD format in the mid-2000s left many wary and recollecting other format wars from the 1980s and 1990s. In 2008 the last studio still releasing HD-DVDs withdrew their support for the format and cemented Blu-ray as the format for the burgeoning HD era.