Speaker 1: Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios,
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works and I Heart Radio and I love
Speaker 1: all Things tech. And this is part four of a
Speaker 1: multi part episode arc about technology and media and how
Speaker 1: the changes in technology change the very business of entertainment
Speaker 1: as well as our relationship to entertainment. And in the
Speaker 1: previous three episodes, I traced the origins of recorded media,
Speaker 1: the birth of the radio, film, and television industries, and
Speaker 1: the rise of the humble audio cassette. And we've seen
Speaker 1: that entertainment was gradually transitioning from something you could only
Speaker 1: experience in the moment, such as when a radio station
Speaker 1: would play a song or a theater would show a film.
Speaker 1: And now we're in an age in which you could
Speaker 1: you could own a permanent record of some of those things.
Speaker 1: Now I've covered music up through the cassette era, so
Speaker 1: we're going to switch back over to television and film
Speaker 1: a bit and the birth of the video cassette. Now,
Speaker 1: one of the challenges in early television was how do
Speaker 1: you broadcast a television program to a national market, most
Speaker 1: broadcasts were done live, and that limited your your options.
Speaker 1: The United States is a really big country, so if
Speaker 1: you did broadcast a show live, let's say that you've
Speaker 1: worked out all the technical details, you still have time
Speaker 1: as a factor. Because the two coasts of the United
Speaker 1: States are in time zones, there are three hours apart
Speaker 1: from each other, so prime time for one coast isn't
Speaker 1: prime time for the other coast. Also, you were limited
Speaker 1: in transmission range, and in the days before massive cable
Speaker 1: companies had connected different regions using cable and satellites, you
Speaker 1: had limited options. So it would be better if you
Speaker 1: could find a a to record a show and then
Speaker 1: broadcast it at a different time slot for other markets.
Speaker 1: And most shows were being shot in New York, so
Speaker 1: if you wanted to have a show in New York
Speaker 1: air in Los Angeles, it made more sense to record
Speaker 1: the show in New York and then send that recording,
Speaker 1: perhaps even via cable, out to broadcast stations in Los Angeles,
Speaker 1: which would then broadcast it. So you still have to
Speaker 1: figure out a way to record the show you were
Speaker 1: actually doing, and recording a show was easier said than done.
Speaker 1: Television cameras and monitor technology was best suited for live broadcast,
Speaker 1: so you would use a camera to capture images, but
Speaker 1: send that signal directly to a transmitter and blasted out
Speaker 1: over radio waves, and then television sets all over the
Speaker 1: region would pick up those transmissions and show the live
Speaker 1: broadcast right then and there. Before the invention of videotape,
Speaker 1: one work around for this was the kinescope. This was
Speaker 1: not an ideal solution. Basically, you would take a film camera,
Speaker 1: kind of like the ones you would use to shoot
Speaker 1: a movie, and it was typically either a sixteen millimeter
Speaker 1: or a thirty five millimeter film camera, and you would
Speaker 1: put it behind a television monitor. You would point it
Speaker 1: at the TV monitor, so you would be shooting a
Speaker 1: program on television cameras, and the monitor would actually be
Speaker 1: displaying the image live on it, and then you would
Speaker 1: use a film camera to capture the image of that
Speaker 1: which was on the monitor screen. So viewers at home,
Speaker 1: at least outside the region that you're directly serving, would
Speaker 1: actually be looking at a picture of a picture. It's
Speaker 1: as if you were to play a YouTube video on
Speaker 1: your computer and then you use your phone's camera to
Speaker 1: stream that video to someone else. It's not ideal. One
Speaker 1: other thing had to be done for this to work.
Speaker 1: By the way, the cameras actually had to be synchronized
Speaker 1: to the monitors scanning rate. So you might remember I've
Speaker 1: talked about this in other episodes. Cathode ray tube monitors
Speaker 1: paint screens line by line from the top to the bottom.
Speaker 1: So they paint a horizontal line, they move down, they
Speaker 1: paint the next horizontal line. Technically they could paint every
Speaker 1: other line and then do a second frame where they're
Speaker 1: doing the other lines. So you do the all the
Speaker 1: oddlines first, then all the even lines. But you get
Speaker 1: the idea. It's the sequence of painting lines. Now it's
Speaker 1: done so quickly that our brains can't process this. We
Speaker 1: just see unbroken moving images. We don't see a series
Speaker 1: of lines being painted on a screen. But if you
Speaker 1: have a film camera that isn't synchronized with the scanning rate,
Speaker 1: then you can pick up an artifact. Typically we see
Speaker 1: this as sort of a rolling horizontal line moving across
Speaker 1: the television screen in regular cycles. If you've ever seen
Speaker 1: any real cheap productions that especially like home videos or
Speaker 1: something that are pointed at a TV screen and you
Speaker 1: see this weird line scanning across the screen over and
Speaker 1: over again. That's what we're seeing. You're seeing this, uh,
Speaker 1: the scan line or representa of that scan line. Because
Speaker 1: the cycle of the camera is different from the scan
Speaker 1: cycle of the monitor. Synchronizing the film camera to the
Speaker 1: monitor scanning rate eliminated that artifact. The pictures were still
Speaker 1: not great. They were grainy, They left a lot to
Speaker 1: be desired, They could be kind of dark, be hard
Speaker 1: to see what's going on. New York citizens typically got
Speaker 1: a pretty darn good image because so much television production
Speaker 1: was happening in New York City. So if you happen
Speaker 1: to live near New York, you were getting the live
Speaker 1: broadcast version. You were not getting the kiniscope version. But
Speaker 1: if you lived in a different time zone, chances are
Speaker 1: you were watching a kiniscope of those programs, and that
Speaker 1: was pretty common in the nineteen forties and early nineteen fifties. Sadly,
Speaker 1: a lot of kinscopes of early television programs have since
Speaker 1: been lost. There wasn't much thought given to preserving television programs.
Speaker 1: Early on TV studios were more concerned with churning out
Speaker 1: content than keeping the stuff that they had. Are He
Speaker 1: made and most stuff would just be broadcast live as
Speaker 1: it happened in its home region and then only used
Speaker 1: for rebroadcast for other time zones. It wasn't used for
Speaker 1: any kind of rebroadcast of the original program, and once
Speaker 1: it was done, it was time to move on. So
Speaker 1: there was no real thought to stuff like syndication, and
Speaker 1: the idea of home theater wasn't a thing for a
Speaker 1: couple of decades. No one was thinking about how can
Speaker 1: I watch the stuff at home on demand? So there's
Speaker 1: a ton of stuff that was shown that we know
Speaker 1: about but that we have no known recordings of. Um.
Speaker 1: This isn't just to the United States. That's happened in
Speaker 1: other places as well. In the United Kingdom, the BBC
Speaker 1: was actually famous for not holding on to stuff that
Speaker 1: future generations thought of as being historically important, but at
Speaker 1: the time no one was really thinking about that. Even
Speaker 1: in the days of videotape, once that became a thing,
Speaker 1: the BBC was known for saving money by taping over
Speaker 1: old videotape. There are a lot of stories about different
Speaker 1: shows that survived that fate simply by purchasing the tapes directly.
Speaker 1: Monty Pythons Flying Circus is one of those, Eric Idol
Speaker 1: actually spent the money to buy the original tapes so
Speaker 1: that the BBC wouldn't tape over them anyway. There were
Speaker 1: a few exceptions to the kinescope approach. In n the
Speaker 1: sitcom I Love Lucy broke new ground by filming every
Speaker 1: episode using three film cameras, the classic three camera set
Speaker 1: up for sitcoms, and they used those instead of television cameras,
Speaker 1: so they would have a live studio audience, but they
Speaker 1: would be using film cameras to capture everything, and then
Speaker 1: the film was used to produce the episode for broadcast
Speaker 1: to all markets, which drastically improved the quality and the
Speaker 1: production cost for the show. So it because it was
Speaker 1: so expensive, it wasn't done for everything it was. I
Speaker 1: Love Lucy was kind of an exception because it was
Speaker 1: high enough in demand for to justify by the expense.
Speaker 1: But in something else was also happening. A guy named
Speaker 1: Charles Ginsburg was hard at work trying to come up
Speaker 1: with an alternative solution to this problem. Ginsburg had just
Speaker 1: started working for a company called Ampex. That's the same
Speaker 1: company that was instrumental in developing multitrack recorders for recording studios.
Speaker 1: That I mentioned in the previous episode. So Ginsburg was
Speaker 1: working to make a practical video tape recorder or vt R.
Speaker 1: And if you listen to my last episode about cassettes,
Speaker 1: you heard me talking about magnetic tape and how it works.
Speaker 1: So I'm not going to repeat all of that here.
Speaker 1: If you have not heard that previous episode, I recommend
Speaker 1: you go check it out first, as the process for
Speaker 1: recording audio to magnetic tape is pretty similar to recording
Speaker 1: video to tape. Now, obviously video carries with it a
Speaker 1: lot more information than just audio, but the process is
Speaker 1: pretty similar. But here's here's a real super fast cliffs
Speaker 1: Notes version of this. An electrical impulse passes through an
Speaker 1: electro magnet, which then generates a fluctuating magnetic field, and
Speaker 1: that magnetic field then magnetizes some sort of medium, and
Speaker 1: in the case of videotape, we're talking about a tape
Speaker 1: coded with ferro magnetic particles. The ferro magnetic particles retain
Speaker 1: their magnetic properties after they pass under the electro magnet,
Speaker 1: so they maintain their magnetic orientation. You can think of
Speaker 1: it like that. And then if you run the tape
Speaker 1: through a player, the reed head reverses this process. It
Speaker 1: induces an electric current to flow through the player, which
Speaker 1: can then be used to regenerate the recorded video and audio.
Speaker 1: Now Ginsburg hailed from San Francisco and he had studied
Speaker 1: engineering in college and he had been working in the
Speaker 1: radio industry since nineteen forty eight. He was mainly focused
Speaker 1: on studio and transmitter engineering, but he got the call
Speaker 1: from Ampex in nineteen fifty one to join their team
Speaker 1: to work on this problem. In fact, the founder of
Speaker 1: Ampex himself, Alexander M. Poniata, gave gave Ginsburg a call
Speaker 1: to bring him over, and Poniatov hope Ginsburg would be
Speaker 1: able to help the company come up with the means
Speaker 1: to record broadcast quality television to videotape, and there have
Speaker 1: been some experiments with this, but the results had not
Speaker 1: been really marketable. Promising but not marketable. So Ginsburg led
Speaker 1: a team to design a system. Ampex patented his design
Speaker 1: in nine two, and that same year Ray Dolby, whose
Speaker 1: name should sound familiar if you're into sound, if you've
Speaker 1: heard about Dolby Sound, he joined the project. He was
Speaker 1: nineteen years old at the time, and his time with
Speaker 1: the project would get interrupted as he would be called
Speaker 1: into military service for a few years uh and then
Speaker 1: he would rejoin the project anyway. This again is not
Speaker 1: to say that these are the first people to ever
Speaker 1: work on this problem or even produce technology that could
Speaker 1: do some form of video to tape. Shortly after World
Speaker 1: War Two, engineers had been trying to find ways to
Speaker 1: preserve television on magnetic tape. But the previous efforts used
Speaker 1: audio tape recorders, and in order to store the same
Speaker 1: amount of information of video as you would with audio,
Speaker 1: you had to run the recorders much faster. You had
Speaker 1: to dedicate a lot more tape to hold all that
Speaker 1: extra information since you had video on top of audio,
Speaker 1: which meant that you had to run these things at
Speaker 1: incredible speeds to achieve a high frequency response suitable for
Speaker 1: preserving television. And by incredible speeds, I mean the tape
Speaker 1: would pass under the recording tape head at a speed
Speaker 1: of around two hundred forty or about six meters per second.
Speaker 1: At that speed, even a short program would need an
Speaker 1: enormous amount of tape. And that was just one typical approach.
Speaker 1: Being Crosby, he wanted to be able to tape essentially
Speaker 1: a month's worth of shows in a single week. That
Speaker 1: way he would work for a week and then have
Speaker 1: the next three weeks off. Sounds like d ill, I
Speaker 1: wish I could do that. I just I don't think
Speaker 1: I can physically record that many episodes in a week
Speaker 1: and then take another month off. But he worked with
Speaker 1: Ampex to use audio tape recorders, and with his approach
Speaker 1: Crosby's approach, they were actually running even faster. They were
Speaker 1: running out of speed of three hundred sixty inches per second.
Speaker 1: That's nine meters per second of film or rather tape,
Speaker 1: not film, but man super fast. So Ginsberg's team comes
Speaker 1: up with a solution, but it wasn't easy. According to
Speaker 1: Ginsburg himself, the project took four years of research and
Speaker 1: testing to come up with a viable way to get
Speaker 1: around this problem, and along the way the project was
Speaker 1: shelved twice. Rather than have the tape pass at this
Speaker 1: incredible rate of speed over the recording head or under
Speaker 1: the recording head, the idea was build a rotating recording head.
Speaker 1: The head would spin as tape passed underneath, and it
Speaker 1: would record tracks of information in arcs and such as
Speaker 1: a stom is called an arcuate recorder and That's a
Speaker 1: word I had never encountered before I did the research
Speaker 1: for this episode. In fact, the first time I saw
Speaker 1: it printed, I thought perhaps I was looking at a
Speaker 1: typo and what they meant to say was an accurate recorder.
Speaker 1: But no, that meant they meant arquate, and that the
Speaker 1: information was being recorded in arcs onto the tape um.
Speaker 1: The recording head that Ginsburg's team built was actually the
Speaker 1: initial one was actually three heads on a rotating drum,
Speaker 1: and it would scan tape that was about two inches
Speaker 1: in width or about five centimeters, and the tape would
Speaker 1: move past the head at a relatively leisurely thirty inches
Speaker 1: per second or seventy six point two centimeters per second,
Speaker 1: which is still pretty fast, but nothing like the two
Speaker 1: per second of the earlier method. What's more, the rotating
Speaker 1: drums speed allowed Ginsburg to record the same amount of
Speaker 1: information as he could if the tape were moving at
Speaker 1: a blistering two thousand, five hundred inches per second. He
Speaker 1: could cramp far more information onto a shorter length of
Speaker 1: tape using this methodology. Still, this early prototype produced recordings that,
Speaker 1: in Ginsberg's own words, produced and quote almost unrecognizable picture
Speaker 1: end quote. The next prototype added another recording head, so
Speaker 1: brought the total up to four on the drum, and
Speaker 1: with some other technical changes that get a little too
Speaker 1: complicated for me to go into in this episode. But
Speaker 1: this version had its own problems and at this stage
Speaker 1: the project was shelved. Technically, it was shelved for a
Speaker 1: second time, and this happened around the summer of nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty three, and the project would not officially start up
Speaker 1: again in earnest until August nine. However, in that off time,
Speaker 1: Ginsburg and others on his team would continue kind of
Speaker 1: working on specific problems on the SLY and so they
Speaker 1: were able to solve some of the issues. While the
Speaker 1: project was officially no longer on the books, Ginsburg was
Speaker 1: able to secure approval from management for a small number
Speaker 1: of hours to be devoted to another prototype, and so
Speaker 1: he and his team built a device that got the
Speaker 1: name the Mark one. On September one, nineteen fifty four,
Speaker 1: Ginsburg's team demonstrated the Mark one to executives and it
Speaker 1: must have gone pretty well because Ampex authorized the project
Speaker 1: to get back into full swing officially, and the major
Speaker 1: change was how the information was being laid down on
Speaker 1: the tape While the earlier prototypes were using that arquit approach,
Speaker 1: in which each line of information moved in an arc
Speaker 1: across the length of the tape, the new one laid
Speaker 1: down the information in straight lines on the tape. Two
Speaker 1: more years of refinements would follow until February ninety six.
Speaker 1: That's when Ginsburg's team would give a new demo to
Speaker 1: thirty Ampex executives, and in that demo, the team used
Speaker 1: a new system, this one called the Mark four, to
Speaker 1: record a video sequence live at the event. So they
Speaker 1: shot video for a couple of minutes. Um they actually
Speaker 1: set up a camera and shot video of the people
Speaker 1: attending the meeting. Then they rewound the tape and they
Speaker 1: fed it through the playback system, and according to Ginsburg,
Speaker 1: at the conclusion of the playback, the whole room erupted
Speaker 1: with a celebration, so it must have gone pretty darn well.
Speaker 1: They followed that up with a demonstration of the Mark
Speaker 1: four at the National Association of Broadcasters conference, and it
Speaker 1: was a huge hit, and Ampex started to get orders
Speaker 1: for its technology, which would change TV production and preservation
Speaker 1: and lay the groundwork for home theaters. When we come back,
Speaker 1: i'll talk more about that evolution and how the video
Speaker 1: tape recorder made its transition to the video cassette recorder.
Speaker 1: But first, let's take a quick break. So the video
Speaker 1: tape recorder or VTR got real start in n S.
Speaker 1: CBS would jump on board first, but other other networks
Speaker 1: would join suit, and for about two decades that's where
Speaker 1: videotape lived. In the production side, it was very rare
Speaker 1: to run into a consumer video tape machine. The systems
Speaker 1: cost thousands of dollars when they first came out, like
Speaker 1: fifty thou dollars uh, and that was well beyond the
Speaker 1: reach of consumers. And the tape was also really expensive
Speaker 1: and it was it was like three dollars a foot,
Speaker 1: so it was prohibitively expensive for almost everyone. This was
Speaker 1: not a consumer device, but a professional production machine. You
Speaker 1: wouldn't have one in your own home unless you were
Speaker 1: extravagantly wealthy and probably a little bit eccentric. So Ampex
Speaker 1: would continue to improve its technology, but other companies also
Speaker 1: got into the mix with their own video tape recorders,
Speaker 1: and the quest for a consumer device would take a
Speaker 1: little longer. You had different companies UH experimenting with different
Speaker 1: widths of videotape, different styles of recording heads. Uh, So
Speaker 1: you had a lot of different companies all trying to
Speaker 1: become the industry leader and to top Ampex. Meanwhile, you
Speaker 1: had a company out of the UK called the Nottingham
Speaker 1: Electric Valve Company that marketed a device called the tail
Speaker 1: Cam in the early nineteen sixties, and this was technically
Speaker 1: the first, or at least one of the first home
Speaker 1: video recording devices on record. This one was pretty limited.
Speaker 1: It could only record about twenty minutes of video per tape,
Speaker 1: and it was real to real tape. It was not
Speaker 1: a cassette, so you actually had to mount reels on
Speaker 1: this device like the old real to real audio recorders.
Speaker 1: The quality of the recording wasn't terribly good. The device
Speaker 1: itself was a bit of a chore to use, and
Speaker 1: on top of it all, it was expensive. So Tellcan
Speaker 1: didn't really seem much success and it would fade away,
Speaker 1: it wouldn't get market support. According to the website Inventricity,
Speaker 1: only two tell Can units are known to exist today.
Speaker 1: One of them is in Nottingham and the other one
Speaker 1: is in San Francisco. Ampex introduced a real to real
Speaker 1: recorder in nineteen sixty three in the United States called
Speaker 1: the Signature five, which used two inch tape, so it's
Speaker 1: about five centimeters wide. The following year, Phillips would introduce
Speaker 1: a different reel to reel video recorder meant for semi
Speaker 1: professional use or what we might refer to as the
Speaker 1: pro sumer market. It could only record in black and white,
Speaker 1: and the tape of the reels measured one inch or
Speaker 1: about two point five centimeters in width. And then Sony
Speaker 1: introduced the CV twenty twenty, which was another reel to
Speaker 1: reel video recorder that used half inch tape. And all
Speaker 1: of these were expensive units and the real to real
Speaker 1: nature meant they weren't very user friendly. You know, you
Speaker 1: still had to feed the tape through the machine and
Speaker 1: then uh, get it attached to the secondary reel and
Speaker 1: then feed it, you know, play it from there. That
Speaker 1: was not easy to do. So like the earlier tel Can,
Speaker 1: they didn't get a widespread adoption among consumers. If you
Speaker 1: were technically savvy and you had a whole bunch of cash,
Speaker 1: then maybe you had one, but otherwise it probably passed
Speaker 1: you by. The real to real format had a lot
Speaker 1: of drawbacks because the tape, just like film could be
Speaker 1: easily damaged by environmental forces. There was nothing protecting the
Speaker 1: tape from stuff like dust or fingers or dogs, and
Speaker 1: so you could very easily damage the tape and ruin
Speaker 1: your recording. Companies were working on prototypes of a form
Speaker 1: factor that would greatly simplify the use of a tape,
Speaker 1: and one of those was Sony, which had started working
Speaker 1: on video cassettes back in nineteen sixty nine and its
Speaker 1: research and development department. In nine seventy, Sony, Panasonic, and
Speaker 1: JVC arrived at an agreed upon standard for video cassettes,
Speaker 1: ensuring that the different companies would create recording and playback
Speaker 1: devices as well as cassettes that could work together across
Speaker 1: the different companies products. So if you bought a any
Speaker 1: video cassette player, then you bought a cassette that was
Speaker 1: made by j VC, you could be sure that the
Speaker 1: two would work together. In Sony introduced the U Matic,
Speaker 1: which is arguably the first video cassette recorder or VCR,
Speaker 1: but the name VCR actually comes from a different device,
Speaker 1: the Phillips Video Cassette Recorder. That one came out a
Speaker 1: couple of months after Sony's. It didn't seem much consumer success,
Speaker 1: but lower budget television stations relied on it to record
Speaker 1: broadcasts to video and in fact in TV production. The
Speaker 1: you Matic would stick around until the nineteen nineties, so
Speaker 1: while it didn't become a vague home device, it did
Speaker 1: play a very important role in TV production behind the scenes.
Speaker 1: A company called c t I introduced another cassette player
Speaker 1: called the cartra Vision in nineteen seventy two. It became
Speaker 1: the first company to offer pre recorded films for purchase
Speaker 1: for the home. So this was the first time you
Speaker 1: had a company not just produce a player, but also
Speaker 1: make deals with production studios to get licensing for films
Speaker 1: or television programs and then to offer them for sale.
Speaker 1: So now people had the option to actually own a
Speaker 1: copy of a film, making it possible to watch whenever
Speaker 1: they wanted. It was a huge, huge deal, right. This
Speaker 1: was a breakthrough in approach, but the cart Revision as
Speaker 1: a format didn't last very long. It didn't take off,
Speaker 1: so while the concept was important, the actual implementation didn't work.
Speaker 1: All of those early devices were really expensive and that
Speaker 1: contributed to their lack of tractions. So while we started
Speaker 1: to see the promise of this technology, it wasn't quite
Speaker 1: at the level where it could be commercially viable for
Speaker 1: the home consumer. That changed in UH. Sony and j
Speaker 1: VC had a little parting of the ways. Had worked
Speaker 1: together to create the standard for you Matic, but now
Speaker 1: Sony was looking to develop its own proprietary approach for
Speaker 1: the home market UH, and so they were both trying
Speaker 1: different proprietary approaches at the same time. Sony's version was
Speaker 1: the Beta Max format, which was smaller than the u
Speaker 1: Matic format. If you had a Pumatic cassette and a
Speaker 1: Beta Max cassette side by side, you'd see the Beta
Speaker 1: Max cassette was smaller, and it was able to produce
Speaker 1: recordings of a comparable quality to you Matic. It wasn't
Speaker 1: quite as good, but it was pretty good. It's really close.
Speaker 1: Then j v C would follow suit in nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: six with the introduction of the VHS format, and thus
Speaker 1: began one of the famous format wars that we talked
Speaker 1: about in Tech Beta Max versus VHS. It's a story
Speaker 1: that we've seen play out lots of different times, and
Speaker 1: it's a story we're going to revisit in a future
Speaker 1: episode with Blu Ray versus HD DVD Beta mat X
Speaker 1: had the edge over VHS when it came to picture quality,
Speaker 1: the quality was slightly better. The difference wasn't a dramatic one,
Speaker 1: but Beta Max could legitimately claim our picture has higher
Speaker 1: resolution than VHS. However, VHS tapes could hold more content
Speaker 1: than Beta Max tapes could. Early Beta Max tapes had
Speaker 1: a limit of about an hour's worth of material, so
Speaker 1: you couldn't even get a full movie on a single
Speaker 1: Beta Max cassette. In the early days, VHS could outperform
Speaker 1: in that space. With a VHS tape, even an early one,
Speaker 1: you could record a whole film onto one cassette. Later
Speaker 1: on you would be able to film to record multiple
Speaker 1: films on a single cassette. The HS slowly got the
Speaker 1: upper hand in the format wars, and by night one,
Speaker 1: the VHS format accounted for seventy five of the VCR market.
Speaker 1: The Beta Max share would drop continuously at you know
Speaker 1: it was that twenty in nine. By night six it
Speaker 1: was down to just seven point five percent of the market.
Speaker 1: So VHS dominated in the space. But while VHS and
Speaker 1: Beta Max were fighting for supremacy, there was another fight
Speaker 1: that was boiling regarding the practice of videotaping at home
Speaker 1: at all. This one originated in Hollywood. So in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy six, the same year that JVC would debut the
Speaker 1: VHS format, the movie studio Universal Pictures filed a copyright
Speaker 1: infringement lawsuit against Sony. The argument Universal made was that
Speaker 1: just by creating a device capable of recording video images
Speaker 1: off of a television, Sony had violated copyright law. Akio Marita,
Speaker 1: Sony's founder, had said that the Beta max device allowed
Speaker 1: for a time shift approach to television. That's something we'll
Speaker 1: talk about again. Upon the development of the digital video recorder,
Speaker 1: so the idea was no longer would you have audiences
Speaker 1: being dependent upon the broadcast schedule of TV stations. I
Speaker 1: don't know if all of you guys remember this. Some
Speaker 1: of you young ones may not have ever known a
Speaker 1: world like this, but back in the day, we were
Speaker 1: completely dependent upon the broadcast schedule of television stations. If
Speaker 1: you were not home at eight pm on a Thursday night,
Speaker 1: you were not going to see that next episode of
Speaker 1: I don't know, cheers um, unless you had to have
Speaker 1: happened to have a VCR where you could set it
Speaker 1: to record while you were away and then you could
Speaker 1: time shift. You could watch the program whenever you wanted
Speaker 1: on your schedule. So it was kind of like an
Speaker 1: on demand kind of approach, except you had to actually
Speaker 1: actively record the show first. But before there were VCRs
Speaker 1: that there was no option. You were either home to
Speaker 1: watch it or you missed it and that was it.
Speaker 1: So Marita's argument was, this is going to give the
Speaker 1: consumer far more flexibility in the consumption of entertainment. So
Speaker 1: you could leave your home, you set your recorder to
Speaker 1: capture a program or a film on television, and then
Speaker 1: you can watch it whenever you wanted. It's something we
Speaker 1: take for granted now, but this was a brand new
Speaker 1: idea in the nineties seventies. It was revolutionary. But Lou
Speaker 1: Wasserman of m c A slash Universal had different plans. See,
Speaker 1: he had an idea that his company was going to
Speaker 1: partner with some other companies on developing a proprietary playback device.
Speaker 1: Uh primarily they were going to partner with Phillips and
Speaker 1: this device was called disco Vision and would later be
Speaker 1: called the Laser Disc. And the plan was to release
Speaker 1: content for this device and it would only be able
Speaker 1: to play that content back it couldn't record anything, It
Speaker 1: could only play back prerecorded material, and that would give
Speaker 1: Universal full control of its television and film libraries. They
Speaker 1: could say, hey, do you want to see our movies,
Speaker 1: Well you can do that, but the only way you
Speaker 1: can do it is to go through us, to buy
Speaker 1: these proprietary discs that will run on this proprietary hardware
Speaker 1: and UH. That way they could have full control of
Speaker 1: the situation. Walt Disney Productions would join with Universal in
Speaker 1: this lawsuit against uh UH, the Sony, and and they
Speaker 1: sought to block all sales of Beta Max machines. Now,
Speaker 1: Sony argued that the Beta Max was similar to tape recorders,
Speaker 1: which had been deemed a legal product all the way
Speaker 1: back in the nineteen sixties. So the U. S. District
Speaker 1: Court would hear the case in nineteen seventy nine, and
Speaker 1: they ruled in favor of Sony. But then the case
Speaker 1: went to an appeals court and the appeals court reversed
Speaker 1: the decision in nineteen one. However, at this point, the
Speaker 1: VCR was really doing pretty well. VCR sales were picking up,
Speaker 1: and the VHS format, which wasn't even Beta Max, was
Speaker 1: already ahead of the Sony beta max approach. So even
Speaker 1: if the the court had argued that there needs to
Speaker 1: be a block on beta max sales, VHS was already winning. However,
Speaker 1: the case would continue through the court system, finally making
Speaker 1: its way all the way to the United States Supreme
Speaker 1: Court in four and the Supreme Court reversed the appeals
Speaker 1: court decision and ruled in favor for Sony that settled
Speaker 1: the matter officially saying these devices do not violate copyright law.
Speaker 1: By half of all American households would own a VCR.
Speaker 1: As for the movie studios well, Even as the case
Speaker 1: was making its way through the court, it became clear
Speaker 1: that video cassettes actually represented a new line of revenue
Speaker 1: generation that it wasn't going to hurt the studios. It
Speaker 1: could actually really help them. Studios could dive into their
Speaker 1: back catalogs of movies and sell video cassettes to consumers
Speaker 1: movies that would otherwise just sit in a storage facility,
Speaker 1: maybe like an old salt mine. They could actually earn money. Again.
Speaker 1: Even Walt Disney Productions would jump on board, though that
Speaker 1: was largely due to a change in leadership because a
Speaker 1: guy named Michael Eisner became CEO of the company, and
Speaker 1: Eisner led the studio to release several of their classic
Speaker 1: films on video cassette, and before long, Disney Movies captured
Speaker 1: something like seven out of the top ten best selling
Speaker 1: video tapes of all time, so it was a very
Speaker 1: much a winning strategy for Walt Disney, even though earlier
Speaker 1: the company had opposed the technology. That same year was
Speaker 1: when the videotape industry actually overtook the film industry in revenue,
Speaker 1: and it turned out the fears of piracy were largely misplaced.
Speaker 1: Just like audio cassettes, most VCRs can only record at
Speaker 1: the same speed as the playback of a source, so
Speaker 1: if you're trying to tape a two hour movie, it
Speaker 1: would take you two hours to tape it. It wasn't
Speaker 1: the sort of thing that the average person could do
Speaker 1: to just churn out pirated copies of videos. Though if
Speaker 1: you got your hands on some semi professional equipment, you
Speaker 1: could do it at a faster clip. You could reproduce
Speaker 1: video tapes faster than your your you know, store brand VCR,
Speaker 1: but that was an investment most folks weren't able to make.
Speaker 1: So it was possible to generate, you know, lots of
Speaker 1: of unlicensed copies of a film, but only if you
Speaker 1: had access to this equipment. If you were just using
Speaker 1: two VCRs at home, it was such a painstakingly long
Speaker 1: process that it didn't make much sense now. In the
Speaker 1: early days, prerecorded video cassettes were really expensive, like if
Speaker 1: you wanted to go out and buy a movie on
Speaker 1: video cassette, you were showing out some big bucks. For example,
Speaker 1: when Columbia Pictures made Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters available for purchase on VHS,
Speaker 1: each copy costs the princely sum of eighty dollars. The
Speaker 1: company sold more than four hundred thousand copies of the
Speaker 1: film at that price, And if you want to adjust
Speaker 1: it for inflation in today's cash, that's nearly a hundred
Speaker 1: ninety dollars for a copy of a movie. And that's
Speaker 1: just for one film. Yikes, switching gears for a second.
Speaker 1: The birth of the video cassette also led to the
Speaker 1: birth of another industry that a video rental. It's pretty
Speaker 1: much agreed that the first, honest to goodness real video
Speaker 1: rental store was created by George Atkinson in nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: seven in Los Angeles, California. A guy named Andre Blair
Speaker 1: had negotiated with studios to license the rights for a
Speaker 1: few dozen films to be recorded to videotape for sale,
Speaker 1: and Atkinson bought up some copies of those films that
Speaker 1: that Blay had licensed, and then he started to offer
Speaker 1: those up as rentals. Atkinson actually faced some opposition for
Speaker 1: this business, with entertainment companies threatening to sue him, but
Speaker 1: he researched copyright law and he saw that he had
Speaker 1: the right, as the owner of a copy of a
Speaker 1: work to rent or resell his copy. He wasn't doing
Speaker 1: anything illegal, he wasn't duplicating the films, He was just
Speaker 1: renting the copy he happened to own. Other video rental
Speaker 1: stores opened in different parts of the country, and by
Speaker 1: night one the owners of several of these stores or
Speaker 1: small chains of stores got together to form an industry
Speaker 1: organization they called the Video Software Dealers Association, and the
Speaker 1: purpose of that organization was to help TechEd video rental
Speaker 1: stores from litigation and changes to what is called the
Speaker 1: first sale doctrine, as the concept that says a copyright
Speaker 1: holder can't stop someone from lending out or reselling their
Speaker 1: legally acquired copy of a copyrighted work without those protections.
Speaker 1: Stuff like libraries would cease to exist because of legal challenges.
Speaker 1: But because this doctrine is in place, I can do
Speaker 1: stuff like by a VHS copy of Tron, and later
Speaker 1: on I can sell it at a garage sale without
Speaker 1: worrying about getting sued for it or whether if I
Speaker 1: am sued for it, I'll win. Now, one thing that
Speaker 1: I couldn't do is I wouldn't be allowed to make
Speaker 1: copies of that Tron tape and then sell those copies
Speaker 1: to other people. The right to reproduce a copyrighted work
Speaker 1: falls to the owner of the copyright. The most I
Speaker 1: could do is I can make a backup copy of
Speaker 1: the Tron tape that I own myself, and I'm not
Speaker 1: selling it. I'm not lending it out. I make a
Speaker 1: backup copy and I put it away in a safe place,
Speaker 1: just in case my original tape breaks or something else
Speaker 1: goes wrong. Backup copies fall under the category of fair
Speaker 1: use and copyright law, meaning it's a fair use of
Speaker 1: the copyrighted work. So there's some fine lines to walk
Speaker 1: in this arena. And developments and technology are what made
Speaker 1: these these ideas necessary, And the same thing holds true
Speaker 1: for record albums and other stuff. Like if I owned
Speaker 1: a vinyl album, I would be allowed to transfer that
Speaker 1: to audio cassette in order for me to have a
Speaker 1: backup copy of that vinyl album should something happen to it.
Speaker 1: But I couldn't make copies of it over and over
Speaker 1: and over again and then give it away or sell
Speaker 1: it to friends. That would be a violation of copyright.
Speaker 1: This is also going to become important when we move
Speaker 1: to digital music, and we'll see that in future episodes. So,
Speaker 1: the video cassette was changing the business of entertainment and
Speaker 1: it allowed for the establishment of video rental companies. The
Speaker 1: men that filmmakers and entertainers had a new market they
Speaker 1: could exploit. This is also when enterprising individuals started making
Speaker 1: content specifically for the home video market. Some we're making
Speaker 1: stuff like self help videos or exercise videos, or made
Speaker 1: for video films and shows. Stuff that couldn't get distribution
Speaker 1: in theaters or on television could find a home on
Speaker 1: video cassette. And boy, if you've ever gone through the
Speaker 1: bargain bins that have had video cassettes in them, you've
Speaker 1: probably seen some examples of this stuff that you otherwise
Speaker 1: never would have heard of. And the late nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: studios began to drop the price of prerecorded video cassettes,
Speaker 1: with tapes dropping below thirty dollars a title, and the
Speaker 1: video cassette era boomed, with VCRs becoming a common component
Speaker 1: in homes around the world. It would also set the
Speaker 1: stage for future technologies like the DVD player and later
Speaker 1: still the HD DVD player and the Blu ray player.
Speaker 1: Those technologies rely on a completely different approach to recording media,
Speaker 1: but the business side of selling and renting copies and
Speaker 1: the consumer relationship with the technology would be similar to
Speaker 1: that of the VCR and the video cassette. It also
Speaker 1: helped establish practices and precedents that would be important upon
Speaker 1: the introduction of devices like digital video recorders. So for now,
Speaker 1: let's shift not in time but in top So when
Speaker 1: we come back, I'll talk a bit about a different
Speaker 1: technology that would displace the audio cassette in the consumer
Speaker 1: music world, the compact disc. But first let's take another
Speaker 1: quick break. While the audio cassette, sometimes called the compact cassette,
Speaker 1: was gearing up to take over the top spot in
Speaker 1: consumer audio from the vinyl record album, its successor was
Speaker 1: already in development, the compact disc, which would be able
Speaker 1: to preserve music and a high fidelity much higher than
Speaker 1: what audio cassettes could do at the time, and with
Speaker 1: proper care, could last much longer than audio cassettes was
Speaker 1: starting to take shape. Interestingly, the compact disc kind of
Speaker 1: rose out of a failure, namely that the aforementioned laser disc.
Speaker 1: So while magnetic tape stored information using magnetism, laser discs
Speaker 1: and later CDs and DVDs and blu rays and h
Speaker 1: D DVDs used optical storage uh optical storage, meaning that
Speaker 1: it was all done with light. So a physicist named
Speaker 1: James Russell pioneered this technology all the way back in
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties. He's a brilliant physicist and also a
Speaker 1: lover of music. That led him kind of down this
Speaker 1: pathway to determine how could he create a new form
Speaker 1: of storage media. He was wanting to make something that
Speaker 1: would preserve music better than the vinyl form factor. See,
Speaker 1: he was frustrated because the vinyl album methodology means you're
Speaker 1: going to be wearing out your records if you listen
Speaker 1: to them a lot, because you're using a physical stylus
Speaker 1: or needle. It's making its way through the grooves on
Speaker 1: the record, and as it does so, it starts to
Speaker 1: wear down those grooves a little bit. So if you
Speaker 1: listen to the same vinyl album enough times, you're going
Speaker 1: to negatively affect the quality of the sound you get
Speaker 1: when you play it back. It just starts to wear down.
Speaker 1: So he said, we need some way to play back
Speaker 1: music that doesn't require physical contact between the media and
Speaker 1: the playback device. There needs to be some way where
Speaker 1: whatever the sensor is that's picking up the information isn't
Speaker 1: directly touching the actual surface that holds that information. He
Speaker 1: determined that if you converted music into binary data. In
Speaker 1: other words, if you encoded the music in zeros and
Speaker 1: ones the information of computers in bits, and you did
Speaker 1: that to describe everything about the music, you know, all
Speaker 1: the frequencies, all the volumes, you could store this music
Speaker 1: digitally onto a medium. By the way, this is essentially
Speaker 1: the idea that Ada Lovelace had way back in the
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds when she was working with Charles Babbage. She
Speaker 1: had suggested that mathematics could be used to represent all
Speaker 1: sorts of things, including music, and that's essentially what Russell
Speaker 1: was saying as well. He was specifically talking about binary
Speaker 1: whereas uh Lovelace did not quite get to that point,
Speaker 1: but Russell was saying, no, we could. We could totally
Speaker 1: describe music in bits and be able to encode it
Speaker 1: in that way, and then using the proper decoding, you
Speaker 1: could decipher the information and replicate the performance. So if
Speaker 1: you use light to pick up this digital information, you
Speaker 1: wouldn't need physical contact with the recorded surface of a
Speaker 1: piece of media. So he filed for a patent in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty six for what he called the Digital to
Speaker 1: Optical Recording and Playback System, and he received the patent
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy. Russell used a photo sensitive platter and
Speaker 1: he programmed it by making alternating dark and light bits
Speaker 1: measuring about a micron in size. So to play back
Speaker 1: what was recorded on the platter, he used a laser
Speaker 1: to scan it, and the laser was register during the
Speaker 1: tiny pits on the platter. Those pits represented the binary
Speaker 1: patterns on the platter. So these pits were telling the
Speaker 1: system whether it was a zero or one. And you
Speaker 1: had some very nice mirrors to reflect any light that
Speaker 1: was being picked up, and that was what was indicating
Speaker 1: whether or not it was a pit. Or just a
Speaker 1: regular plateau on the platter. This became sort of the
Speaker 1: basis for the laser disc. Universal and Phillips would license
Speaker 1: the pattern from Russell, but they departed from Russell's plan. See,
Speaker 1: Russell wanted to record in pure digital. He wanted to
Speaker 1: convert everything into binary information. Everything was supposed to be bits.
Speaker 1: The laser disc went a slightly different way. So the
Speaker 1: laser disc would record information on a platter on a
Speaker 1: disc in the form of little pits, just like Russell's vision,
Speaker 1: but the encoding was analog, not digital, so instead of
Speaker 1: it being a representation of zeros and ones, the shape
Speaker 1: and the length of the pits indicated the analog information
Speaker 1: that was encoded onto the disc. So you could argue
Speaker 1: the laser disc is mostly an analog format, which it
Speaker 1: gets really confusing because you're using an optical approach, but
Speaker 1: it is technically, at least in some definitions, and analog medium. Now,
Speaker 1: to get into the real reasons why this is so
Speaker 1: would require a much more in depth look at the
Speaker 1: laser disc, and honestly, I don't have the time to
Speaker 1: do that in this episode, so I'll save that for
Speaker 1: a future episode. I'll do a full episode just about
Speaker 1: the development of the laser disc in a future episode
Speaker 1: of tech Stuff, But it was a fundamentally different approach
Speaker 1: to what Russell was working on this. The pits on
Speaker 1: the laser disc look kind of like the ones you
Speaker 1: would see on a c D or a DVD or
Speaker 1: a Blu ray if you had a microscope to really
Speaker 1: look at them, but they didn't represent digital bits of
Speaker 1: information in the same way. All right, So back to Russell.
Speaker 1: I want to take a second here to point out
Speaker 1: that russ really was a genius still is. It's not
Speaker 1: just that he came up with a new method of
Speaker 1: storing data onto a medium. He was also able to
Speaker 1: figure out how to encode audio in binary data so
Speaker 1: that it could be decoded and played back, and it
Speaker 1: took years of hard work and research to pull it
Speaker 1: all off. Digital recording is different from analog, and I've
Speaker 1: done episodes about this as well, so I'm not going
Speaker 1: to go into great detail, but I do want to
Speaker 1: kind of address this for a little bit. With analog,
Speaker 1: you've got a continuous input signal, right, It's like if
Speaker 1: you were to look at a wave, it's just a
Speaker 1: steady wave that is unbroken. Binary is a little bit different.
Speaker 1: With binary, you sample an incoming signal. UH sampling is
Speaker 1: kind of like taking snapshots of a signal, and the
Speaker 1: more samples you take per given unit of time, the
Speaker 1: greater the resolution of your recording. I'm going to give
Speaker 1: you a quick analogy this. This is just a sort
Speaker 1: of visualize while I'm talking about. So let's say you're
Speaker 1: standing outside of a room and the door to that
Speaker 1: room is currently closed. It's a very heavy door. You
Speaker 1: can open the door, but shortly after you open it,
Speaker 1: you have to let go and it'll slam shut. So
Speaker 1: when you open the door, you can hear what's going
Speaker 1: on inside the room, but when the door is closed,
Speaker 1: you can't make out what's going on. And because the
Speaker 1: door will slam shut shortly after you open it, you
Speaker 1: only get a moment to hear something. So you open
Speaker 1: the door quickly and you hear a lot of people
Speaker 1: being loud, but you only hear it for that instant
Speaker 1: before the door shuts and you can't hear anything else.
Speaker 1: And at that moment, you can't really draw any conclusions
Speaker 1: about what you just heard. You just heard people being loud.
Speaker 1: You don't know if they're happy or they're angry, or
Speaker 1: they're scared, or they're just trying to talk over each other.
Speaker 1: So you open the door again. And the more times
Speaker 1: you're able to open the door, the better an idea
Speaker 1: you have of what's going on inside that room. And
Speaker 1: if you're able to open up the door very quickly,
Speaker 1: like right after it closes, it could be almost like
Speaker 1: you're hearing what's going on in the room uninterrupted. Of course,
Speaker 1: from an outside observer, you would look like you were
Speaker 1: quite eccentric as you kept on opening a door that
Speaker 1: kept shutting on you. Digital sampling is a little bit
Speaker 1: like that, though it gets much more technical as you
Speaker 1: might imagine. But the digital nature of processing the sound
Speaker 1: opened up a new battleground between audio files and people
Speaker 1: just wanted easy access to music. I'll touch on that
Speaker 1: a bit more in the next episode. The LaserDisc gathered
Speaker 1: a devoted audience of film lovers, but the expense of
Speaker 1: the devices and the limited video library meant and didn't
Speaker 1: get widespread adoption the man, You know, LaserDiscs were pretty
Speaker 1: darn neat. You typically had to flip them over to
Speaker 1: watch a whole movie. One side might hold thirty or
Speaker 1: sixty minutes worth of materials, so they had a limited capacity.
Speaker 1: But they also introduced other stuff that would become standard
Speaker 1: in future formats, stuff like extra features which you wouldn't
Speaker 1: get in a typical VHS tape. You know, you buy
Speaker 1: a VHS tape of a movie, you get the movie.
Speaker 1: You buy a laser disc of the movie, you might
Speaker 1: get some commentary, you might get extra scenes, you might
Speaker 1: get a lot of stuff, and you could jump around
Speaker 1: and watch different scenes through essentially the random access approach.
Speaker 1: But you couldn't do that with VHS. You had to
Speaker 1: just watch at whatever point the tape was at. You
Speaker 1: could fast forward or rewind, but you couldn't just jump
Speaker 1: to a chapter or something. You could do that with
Speaker 1: laser discs. So this was stuff that would carry over
Speaker 1: into the DVD and Blu ray eras and it opened
Speaker 1: up new opportunities and entertainment. So again we see how
Speaker 1: the evolution of technology would change the actual business of entertainment.
Speaker 1: Phillips initially was ready to say sayannara to the optical
Speaker 1: storage format after the laser disc failed to win out
Speaker 1: over the cassette based video formats that were already on
Speaker 1: the market, but eventually the company, along with Sony came
Speaker 1: around to the idea for audio discs, and the compact
Speaker 1: disc was born. Phillips unveiled a prototype of the compact
Speaker 1: disc in teen seventy nine, but it would be a
Speaker 1: few years before the format was standardized. For one thing,
Speaker 1: Sony allegedly demanded that a single compact disc would need
Speaker 1: to be able to hold an entire performance of Beethoven's
Speaker 1: Ninth Symphony. So, if you've ever wondered why a standard
Speaker 1: c D is four point seven inches or twelve centimeters
Speaker 1: in diameter, allegedly it's because of Beethoven. The duration of
Speaker 1: Beethoven's symphony depends upon the arrangement, but typically the Ninth
Speaker 1: Symphony tends to last somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy minutes. However,
Speaker 1: they were looking for the longest version of the symphony
Speaker 1: recorded to make that the standard, and it clocked in
Speaker 1: at around seventy four minutes. And to hold that much audio,
Speaker 1: the CD would have to be twelve centimeters in diameter,
Speaker 1: and there we have it. Phillips and Sony established the
Speaker 1: standards for CDs in nineteen eighty, with Phillips showing off
Speaker 1: the first production model meant for consumers two years later,
Speaker 1: and according to the BBC, the first two commercial c
Speaker 1: D presses ever were a recording of Strauss's Alpine Symphony
Speaker 1: and the immortal album The Visitors by Abba Super. When
Speaker 1: the CD got started in the early nineteen eighties, it
Speaker 1: wouldn't really start to be a threat to the cassette
Speaker 1: until the nineteen nineties. So in our next episode will
Speaker 1: continue our look at the c D and its impact
Speaker 1: on the entertainment industry, including more about the audio file
Speaker 1: objection I mentioned earlier. Will also look into the birth
Speaker 1: of DVDs and their successors and lay the ground for
Speaker 1: the digital file era. I hope you guys are enjoying
Speaker 1: this series. I really like looking at this sort of
Speaker 1: big picture stuff, this evolution of technology and how that
Speaker 1: changed not just the business, but are very thoughts around entertainment,
Speaker 1: how our attitudes about entertainment have changed as the technology
Speaker 1: has enabled different ways to consume that that entertainment um
Speaker 1: to me. This is what I love most about tech stuff,
Speaker 1: is this relationship between technology industry and our our society.
Speaker 1: So I hope you guys are enjoying this, and if
Speaker 1: you're not, don't worry. Pretty soon we're gonna be off
Speaker 1: this topic and talking about all sorts of other stuff.
Speaker 1: If you have your own suggestions of what I should
Speaker 1: be covering next, why not send me an email the
Speaker 1: addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com or
Speaker 1: pop on over to tech stuff podcast dot com. That's
Speaker 1: our website where you'll find the archive of all of
Speaker 1: our older episodes, plus you'll find links to our social
Speaker 1: media presence. You can reach out to me on Facebook
Speaker 1: or on Twitter and I'll be happy to hear your
Speaker 1: suggestions there as well. And also don't forget to head
Speaker 1: on over to our store and if you purchase something
Speaker 1: over there, it goes to help the show and we
Speaker 1: greatly appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again really soon.
Speaker 1: Hex Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How
Speaker 1: Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit
Speaker 1: the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: listen to your favorite shows. Three