After Philips’ compact audio cassette achieved widespread success in the consumer market, competitors—including Sony—hoped to replicate that success in the realm of video. Their aim was to develop a cassette- or cartridge-based video tape that could open up an entirely new consumer sector. However, video signals require hundreds of times more bandwidth than audio signals, and magnetic tape cannot simply be made hundreds of times wider or longer. To create a user-friendly video tape system, a host of engineering problems had to be solved. To understand these issues, we must start from the earliest developments in video tape.