Return of the video cassette?

Way back in the mists of not all that long ago, the video cassette revolutionised the movie industry, allowing you to watch what you wanted, when you wanted. For the benefit of younger readers, with the exception of the convenience, tape technology was inescapably terrible - poor picture quality that degraded the more you watched it, machines that would damage or destroy your tapes with alarming frequency, and you had to rewind the tape at the end (which never happened, leading to 100% of family arguments in the 1980s). It may come as a surprise then that Sony have pushed on with cassette research with some astounding results.

The latest Sony prototype cassette can hold a remarkable 185TB of data (equivalent to over 3775 dual-layer Blu-ray discs). The production process also sounds pretty cool, involving "shooting argon ions at a polymer film substrate, which produces layers of magnetic crystal particles." No lasers though, I do love a laser.


Sadly even this is unlikely to see a return of video cassettes to the home. They would still suffer from the same problems as old cassettes, and you would still have to fast-forward through the entire tape to find the thing you wanted to watch (tiresome enough when it was one TV episode, let alone 3775 movies!). The tapes are, however, likely to be welcomed into the much less interesting data archiving industry.

Original story: IT World