Hi pjay, great post.
Yes, this is becoming a cause of concern for many. There is an uneasy feeling in the air among many of us that rely on high quality DVD blanks for burned masters, archives and data backups.
The loss of Daxon was, to use a colorful metaphor, a swift kick to the crotch earlier this year. That wiped out a major high-quality blanks manufacturer.
When companies like Princo and Megan Media (MJC) went away, nobody cared! They made mediocre/crappy discs, and their loss was a benefit to consumers. The worldwide recession really shook up a lot of these low-budget slop operations and kicked them to the curb where they belonged. Some companies, Princo for example, are still in business -- but there's not any media being produced that I'm aware of. Certainly not in North America or Europe.
But the downside was that a number of good companies were taking hits, too. And to add insult to injury, consumers somehow developed these crazy ideas that media should never cost more than $20 per 100 discs! That's insane!
The push back of this unreasonable consumer demand has become obvious, as TY started to cut corners using Chinese packaging and Verbatim started to use cheap CMC discs under their new "Values Series" and "Life Series" discs.
Indeed, where have all the good media gone?
We used to have Pioneer, TDK, Maxell, Taiyo Yuden, Mitsubishi, Daxon/Sony. (I refer to manufacturers, of course, not the brands. I realize TDK, Maxell and Sony are still available -- but using third-party cheap discs from Ritek and CMC, mostly.)
And to a lesser extent, Ricoh, Infodisc, and even Optodisc was not too bad some years ago.
I'm not really aware of any takeovers, no -- it's all companies that are shuttering and closing shop for good. In some cases, companies ended production/manufacturing of blank optical media, either temporarily or permanently.
DL media is costly to produce, and the technology I think would be harder to reverse engineer cheaply as had been done with DVD-R in China. You really only have a few mainstream manufacturers, such as CMC, FTI, Ritek and Mitsubishi. Even Mitsubishi uses MBI and Falcon (FTI) for some of the manufacturing (to MCC/MKM specs, of course).
There are many more than do have double-layer DVD+R available, but I've never seen the discs, as the companies would have been for Asian markets. I don't think it would have been good stuff anyway, coming from the same folks that made inferior/fake single-layer discs.
If you like a certain disc, calculate your yearly usage and buy yourself a one-year minimum stock.
That's my take on it.