Sony is finally phasing out the DAT medium (Babelfish translation and community reaction). To be honest, I thought this happened years ago. There are no plans to cease production on the blank tapes themselves, but recording/playback equipment will no longer be made.
Why is this important? Well, it goes a long way towards showing that “obsolete” formats still have some life left as long as a) there’s a dedicated user-base, and b) blank media are still available. Take Minidisc, for example: the format was written off as a failure outside of Japan back around 1998, but Sharp and Sony still make recorders for it, and you can still get media at the local Megalomart.
Minidisc still has a fervent following as a reliable and worthy medium for portable recording. It “failed” because Sony hyped it (along with Phillips’ lamented DCC) as a “replacement” for pre-recorded commercial CDs. This was 1994-1995, when the cassette was being (thank God) phased out of production. Consumers at the time resented the forced migration to Compact Disc, and the idea that those would be replaced with yet another format…well, it hardly met with a warm welcome.
However, the Minidisc proved to be a superior format to tape for recording, and the hi-fi and studio markets caught on. Portable units were smaller than CD players, and the sound quality of Minidisc’s ATRAC compression is far superior to MP3. The format wasn’t without problems, however.
Foremost was Sony’s insistence on crippling things with DRM. You can record from any analog source to a MD recorder, and if you have a unit with an optical output (many DVD players, the PS2, some high-end receivers), you can make a direct digital recording. However, you cannot dupe the minidisc to another. This wasn’t too big a deal, but the main problem was, “how do I upload recordings to a computer?”
Sony steadfastly refused to allow MSC connections for Minidisc recorders, so the only way to get a recording (even your own) on to a hard drive was to play it back into the computer’s sound-card, essentially re-recording it in real time. Yeah, it’s great to record something to a minidisc, but what do you do with it then? Sony offered a format called NetMD that allowed for transfers to computer via USB, but it was stuck with DRM and required Sony’s proprietary (and Windows-only) software.
Still, the Minidisc hangs on. I have one, and love it. Had it been marketed for what it is (a wonderful replacement for the tape recorder), it would have taken off. As a CD-killer, however, it was doomed from the start.
Which brings us to topic #2, the impending death of the DVD format. Will my old DVDs be useless in a couple of years? According to the RIAA marketing machine, yes. According to the history of format obsolescence, no. I’ll need to step up to one of those new formats sooner or later, but no company with an ounce of self-preservation is going to introduce units that aren’t backward-compatible.
When the Rolling Stones’ catalog was remastered and issued on CD back in the mid-90s, there was a full-page ad in Rolling Stone that urged customers to “throw out your Rolling Stones records!” You’d be surprised how many people didn’t. I still have Exile on Main Street on vinyl, and I’m keepin’ it. So are many others. Format changes and forced obsolesence can only happen if the public’s willing to swallow them.