Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

Are you sure you don't mean a 3/4" UMatic machine?

Are you asking me? No, they may have those too, I didn't notice. I noticed the 1 inch (maybe 2 inch??) machines because they look like huge 16 track reel to reel audio machines, which got me all excited when I first saw them.

My understanding is that they used to use them to archive important video way way WAY back, and they kept them around just in case they had to access those tapes some day. In the 3 stations I worked at I never saw any reeled tapes though. Our footage was all shot on dvcpro and archived on Beta SP (thousands of them in a big room). Even after we switched from tape to tape editing to Avid we still archived all the finished packages on Beta SP, I guess hard drive space was too expensive back then?