Still buying Betamax tapes for your sweet SL-HF 360 SuperBeta player? Well, brace yourself, because Sony has announced it's going to stop producing tapes for the failed format in March 2016.

Yes, apparently Sony was still producing Betamax tapes in Japan, despite players and recorders having been discontinued in 2002. The format was dead far earlier than that, though, after a prolonged battle with the VHS standard in the '70s and '80s. VHS ultimately won out thanks to a wider range of cheaper players and a longer overall recording time. At launch, Betamax only offered up to one hour of recording time, but it boasted slightly better image quality than VHS.

Also being taken off the market alongside Betamax tapes are Sony's MicroMV camcorder cassettes, which were used by a huge range of its camcorders in the early 2000s. However, if you still really need both Betamax and MicroMV tapes, there are a whole bunch of them available on eBay in Japan.

Betamax is survived by Betacam, a similar but incompatible professional videocassette format that is still in use to this day. Its digital version, DigiBeta, became the standard for professional broadcast digital recording video tape.

Sony, of course, went on to fight another format war against Toshiba's HD-DVD with Blu-ray, a war that it resoundingly won. Thanks to the massive disruption of streaming video though, the result of that war probably won't be as significant as VHS versus Betamax.