The Philips Digital Compact Cassette was introduced in 1992 at the same time as the Sony MiniDisc.

The sales and marketing hype was that it was  backwards compatible with the popular and established analogue cassette tape. Although the two types of cassette construction where very different, the basic physical size was similar allowing the DCC player mechanism to accommodate the older analogue cassette for playing in the DCC players.  The DCC system had a very impressive technical specification and provided CD audio quality recording and playback. But the public expected "instant audio track access" on high technology digital products (as the optical CD and MD) and the DCC "tape format" was seen as past and outdated technology and had very poor general customer appeal.         It was Philips plan for DCC to be the successor for the 1964 analogue cassette tape, but it turned out to be a multi million pound blunder, but a great lessons learned for the whole audio industry.    Production of the DCC machines ceased on the 31st October 1996 when Philips finally accepted that this digital tape format had no  hope of success just four years its introduction.