The digital compact cassette, from Philips and Panasonic, was a strong effort at modernizing the format in the era of optical disks, and the failure of it and Sony's competing options has as much to do with corporate proprieties than the technical inferiority of tape media. In this video, Techmoan fascinates over the cassettes, "a revelation at the time", and explains the clever features of the format.
A look at what's new with Philips long dead 1990s Digital Compact Cassette format.
Did you know that RCA developed a video vinyl format in the 1970s, but spent so long fiddling around with it that VHS ate their lunch? Imagine if that had caught on! Vinyl movies! RCA projected that by 1985, the players "would be in close to 50% of American homes," Wikipedia reports, but you couldn't fit a whole movie on one, so no, they would not.
