Happy Halloween! For this week’s obsolete and now-obscure media format, we’re highlighting a real Godzilla-sized monster of a videotape: the D-2.
This format is most notable for:
- its enormous scale (one cassette is approximately the size of your average sheet cake; it’s also relatively comparable to the width of the average person’s shoulders)
- for being the video format of choice for finished recordings of South Park
- being in widespread use for approximately 10 years after its introduction to the market in 1989, and widely accepted as an archival format (difficult to imagine something this large and clunky being the go-to video preservation format, and yet! Stranger things do happen).
