Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
Speaker 1: tech are you? You know, nostalgia is a heck of
Speaker 1: a thing. It's fairly typical for popular media to depict
Speaker 1: stuff from a generation earlier. You know, studios are catering
Speaker 1: to adults by reminding them of their childhoods. Plus, studios
Speaker 1: are run by people who are potentially thinking back to
Speaker 1: their own childhoods and how much quote unquote better it
Speaker 1: was back then. So we've seen this multiple times, right
Speaker 1: back in the nineteen seventies. If you are of an
Speaker 1: age as i am, back in the seventies and early eighties,
Speaker 1: you had movies like Greece and the far Superior Grease Too,
Speaker 1: which were set in the late fifties early sixties. These
Speaker 1: days we see shows like Stranger Things and films like
Speaker 1: The four thirty, these are set in the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 1: We see this reflected in other ways as well. The
Speaker 1: vinyl format for LPs and such was on its way
Speaker 1: toward extinction with the introduction of other technologies like compact
Speaker 1: discs CDs did a number on Vinyl as well as
Speaker 1: audio cassette tapes, but then in the mid two thousands,
Speaker 1: Vinyl began to mold a comeback. These days, Vinyl's a
Speaker 1: booming business again, and the reasons for that are varied,
Speaker 1: from the mythology of audio files about the superiority of
Speaker 1: the Vinyl format to the desire to actually own a
Speaker 1: copy of music rather than be beholden to some streaming
Speaker 1: service that may or may not carry that music. In
Speaker 1: the future, and I'll probably do a full episode about
Speaker 1: the Vinyl revival and kind of trace how that came
Speaker 1: to be, because I think that's a pretty interesting story.
Speaker 1: But as I was thinking about all this, I decided
Speaker 1: I should do another episode about obsolete media. Now. Originally
Speaker 1: I was going to do a round up episode with
Speaker 1: several different intrees, several different examples of obsolete media. I've
Speaker 1: done some of these in the past, and in fact
Speaker 1: I had to go and take a look back on
Speaker 1: past episodes to figure out what technologies I had already covered.
Speaker 1: I've done it a lot. In fact, I have an
Speaker 1: episode from just two years ago that went into detail
Speaker 1: about obsolete formats that I had completely forgotten about. Like
Speaker 1: I remembered I had done episodes about obsolete media, but
Speaker 1: I didn't remember that it was just two years ago
Speaker 1: when I did a big one. In that one, I
Speaker 1: covered stuff like the umatic video cassette, which Sony was
Speaker 1: pushing out as a consumer product, but it mainly saw
Speaker 1: use in broadcast studios, not in consumer technology. Instead, the
Speaker 1: VHS and Betamax formats would take over that market, or
Speaker 1: the tefifon or tefifhone format tefi fon. Took me a
Speaker 1: while to track that down because it didn't spell it
Speaker 1: in that episode from twenty twenty two, but that was
Speaker 1: a media format out of West Germany or what was
Speaker 1: West Germany at that time, and I dedicated about a
Speaker 1: third of the episode to this tech back in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two and forgot about it. It's really cool though.
Speaker 1: It uses a ribbon of plastic and a groove kind
Speaker 1: of like what you would find on a record album,
Speaker 1: and the plastic tape that's inside these cassettes. It's in
Speaker 1: a loop, so it does loop all the way back around.
Speaker 1: You don't have to rewind to the beginning or anything.
Speaker 1: It was a neat technology, just didn't see much use
Speaker 1: outside of Germany. But in previous episodes, I've also talked
Speaker 1: about the organette, which is a device that works in
Speaker 1: a way that's similar to a player piano. I talked
Speaker 1: about wire recorders, where the recording medium was literally a
Speaker 1: length of stainless steel wire. But in this episode, I'm
Speaker 1: going to talk about a device that I've mentioned a
Speaker 1: couple times before, but I have never dedicated a full
Speaker 1: episode to it. And I'm doing this purely out of
Speaker 1: nostalgia because I actually own one of these devices. In fact,
Speaker 1: it's sitting immediately to my right as I am recording
Speaker 1: this episode, and the tech is the RCA CED player,
Speaker 1: or more officially, the RCA videodisc system. And I should
Speaker 1: probably have warned you that this episode's going to have
Speaker 1: some alphabet soup stuff going on. But RCA stands for
Speaker 1: the Radio Corporation of America. That was a company that
Speaker 1: had an absolutely critical role to play in the production
Speaker 1: of media here in the United States. RCA's history is
Speaker 1: one that includes dominating radio broadcasts and being a huge
Speaker 1: player in the early recording industry, as well as much more.
Speaker 1: Now I've done episodes about RCA. In fact, I did
Speaker 1: a series of I think four episodes about the history
Speaker 1: and evolution of RCA back in twenty nineteen. Because again,
Speaker 1: this company is huge, it has a very long history,
Speaker 1: and it has had a massive impact on the evolution
Speaker 1: of technology in tons of different ways. However, the CED player,
Speaker 1: I would argue, would not rank among those massive influences
Speaker 1: on technology. CED stands for capacitance Electronic disc and I'll
Speaker 1: explain why a little bit later. But first some history,
Speaker 1: which is a bit complicated, as one of the best
Speaker 1: accounts about the CED is stored on the CED format itself,
Speaker 1: and since CED is an obsolete medium, it stanged hard
Speaker 1: to get access to that material. Gosh, if only the
Speaker 1: format hadn't gone obsolete, I could learn more about this
Speaker 1: obsolete format, or at least that would be the case.
Speaker 1: We're in not for the fact that YouTube exists, and
Speaker 1: of course people have created YouTube videos of that recorded
Speaker 1: material that was originally only on CED. The channel I
Speaker 1: got access to this material from was the media Hoarder.
Speaker 1: They posted a historical video on YouTube. So RCA actually
Speaker 1: made a video disc or CED for its own employees
Speaker 1: who had worked on the player. So these are people
Speaker 1: within RCA who had dedicated their time and efforts into
Speaker 1: the creation of this technology, and RCA wanted to acknowledge
Speaker 1: them and to say, y'all did amazing work. Even though
Speaker 1: the product ultimately failed in the marketplace, the technological achievements
Speaker 1: were really substantial. And this ced that RCA made for
Speaker 1: RCA employees was titled Memories of Video disc So this
Speaker 1: was already when the format was on the way out,
Speaker 1: and that format only lasted a couple of years after
Speaker 1: being introduced. And I just think that's pretty neat. You
Speaker 1: know that a company would actually spend the resources to
Speaker 1: make a record of the work that folks had done
Speaker 1: on a technology that ultimately was a market failure. Like
Speaker 1: most companies' do that, right, They wouldn't take the time
Speaker 1: and spend the money to create a record of this
Speaker 1: and to say this is an exploration of the work
Speaker 1: and effort and innovation that went into this technology. They
Speaker 1: just wouldn't do it. They would kind of like mark
Speaker 1: it off the books and try to move on as
Speaker 1: fast as possible. But anyway, the story actually begins in
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties when RCA engineers, led by a guy
Speaker 1: named Thomas Stanley, began to experiment with ways to record
Speaker 1: not just audio, but also video onto grooved discs like
Speaker 1: vinyl record albums. So RCAA had been a really important
Speaker 1: company during the early days of record players. They bought
Speaker 1: the Victor Talking Machine Company and became RCA Victor, so
Speaker 1: that was a massive move, Victor being like the oldest
Speaker 1: company to produce gramophones or phonographs, and RCA even introduced
Speaker 1: a thirty three and a third RPM format before World
Speaker 1: War Two, so RPM being revolutions per minute, most records
Speaker 1: were at seventy eight RPM. It was challenging playing records
Speaker 1: at slower RPMs, which would allow you to fit more
Speaker 1: material per side of a record, but it also meant
Speaker 1: that the quality of the audio played back would often
Speaker 1: take a hit. Right faster RPMs you typically would get
Speaker 1: better audio quality, but you could fit less material per side.
Speaker 1: Slower you could fit more material, but the quality wasn't
Speaker 1: as good. RCA had created a thirty three and a
Speaker 1: third format leading up to World War Two. Actually, I
Speaker 1: think it was around nineteen thirty when they introduced that,
Speaker 1: and this version of thirty three and a third was
Speaker 1: different from the post war format. After the war, you
Speaker 1: had Columbia Records, which introduced micro grooves and allowed for
Speaker 1: the LP or long playing format. So while RCA did
Speaker 1: have a thirty three and a third version, it wasn't
Speaker 1: an LP album. It couldn't fit as much information as
Speaker 1: a microgroove record would later on, but it was still neat. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: the record players that had a thirty three and a
Speaker 1: third speed available to them were exorbitantly expensive, and it
Speaker 1: was the middle of the Great Depression, and as you
Speaker 1: might imagine, those two factors together meant this particular medium
Speaker 1: didn't get much traction in the market. But RCAA engineers
Speaker 1: were really well acquainted with the concept of encoding information
Speaker 1: within the groove of a rotatable disc and using a
Speaker 1: stylus to pick up that information, convert that information into
Speaker 1: an electric signal, and then amplify that signal so it
Speaker 1: could be played back as audio on an electronic device.
Speaker 1: While RCAA would engage in fierce competition against rivals like
Speaker 1: Columbia Records, giving rise to a format war that ultimately
Speaker 1: ended in a truce, it would also continue to innovate
Speaker 1: with this kind of technology. So by the late night
Speaker 1: teen fifties, the thinking was that if a grooved album
Speaker 1: can hold the information necessary for audio playback. When used
Speaker 1: with the proper turntable and stylus, it could potentially do
Speaker 1: so even for other kinds of information. With a fine
Speaker 1: enough stylus and precise grooves that were of a small
Speaker 1: enough form factor, you could presumably include data that encoded
Speaker 1: not just an audio signal, but a video signal as well.
Speaker 1: Initial work was sporadic, but in nineteen sixty four a
Speaker 1: pair of engineers named Eugene Kaiser and John Clemens tackled
Speaker 1: this problem in earnest But how would you encode the information?
Speaker 1: Physical grooves would need to be incredibly precise, and the
Speaker 1: stylust would have to be unbelievably tiny or fine pointed.
Speaker 1: The folks at RCA came up with the idea of
Speaker 1: using capacitance. So capacitance is the capability of a conductor
Speaker 1: to store an electrical charge, and using a pair of
Speaker 1: such conductors, you can measure the difference of a separated
Speaker 1: electric charge between the two of them, a difference in voltage.
Speaker 1: In other words, lots of variables determine this difference in voltage.
Speaker 1: For example, the plate area of the two capacitors is
Speaker 1: a factor how much overlap is between the two plates
Speaker 1: that affects the difference in voltage between them. So if
Speaker 1: you were to move the plates relative to one another
Speaker 1: to change the amount of overlap, you actually change the
Speaker 1: difference in voltage as well. Another variable is applied voltage,
Speaker 1: So obviously, if you change the voltage that is applied
Speaker 1: to one capacitor, it's going to affect the difference in
Speaker 1: voltage between it and a second capacitor. But another variable
Speaker 1: is distance. If you change the distance between the two
Speaker 1: separated capacitors, they will register a change in voltage. So
Speaker 1: if you keep all other variables constant and the only
Speaker 1: thing you allow to change is the distance between the capacitors,
Speaker 1: you can use that as your encoding mechanism for data.
Speaker 1: And that was the secret to the CED. The disc
Speaker 1: would have a layer of carbon on it. This is
Speaker 1: a conductive material, and inside the grooves of the disc,
Speaker 1: if you could get in there, like the trench of
Speaker 1: the Death Star in Star Wars, you would see that
Speaker 1: the floor of that groove had little peaks and valleys.
Speaker 1: The floor would come up at some points and dip
Speaker 1: down in other points. Now, the stylus on a CED
Speaker 1: player had a titanium electrode tip on it. It was
Speaker 1: usually a diamond tipped stylus with a titanium electrode at
Speaker 1: the very tip. Now, the size of the stylus was
Speaker 1: such that it would fit into a groove, but the
Speaker 1: stylus wasn't so long that it would actually touch the
Speaker 1: floor of the groove. So the tip of the stylus
Speaker 1: is suspended above the groove's floor, and the peaks and
Speaker 1: valleys of the groove meant the floor would change the
Speaker 1: distance between the floor itself and the titanium electrode on
Speaker 1: the tip of that stylus, and that was changing the
Speaker 1: distance between two capacitors, which resulted in a difference in
Speaker 1: the voltage red by the stylus. Ultimately, this would be
Speaker 1: the signal that would be sent to the player, which
Speaker 1: would then decode the signal and send it on to
Speaker 1: a television set, and then you could watch your copy
Speaker 1: of you know, Singing in the Rain or Indiana Jones
Speaker 1: and Raiders of the Lost Arc. I named both of
Speaker 1: those titles because I know they appeared on CED, because
Speaker 1: I have those titles. Those are two of the films
Speaker 1: I actually own on CED, so that's why I chose them.
Speaker 1: I was confident that they exist and This was really
Speaker 1: a brilliant move because switching from physical vibrations. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's how your regular vinyl records work, right. A stylus
Speaker 1: goes through this groove. There are ridges and things cut
Speaker 1: into the groove. The stylus or needle vibrates as it
Speaker 1: travels through this groove. Those vibrations get transformed into an
Speaker 1: electrical signal which then is amplified and sent to speakers
Speaker 1: and played back as audio. You know, that's all physical,
Speaker 1: but by going to capacitance, it allowed for the possibility
Speaker 1: of video because you were able to have much more
Speaker 1: precise encoding in a very dense format. I'll talk more
Speaker 1: about it, but first let's take a quick break to
Speaker 1: thank our sponsors. Before the break, I was talking about
Speaker 1: how capacitance allowed for more data density than a purely
Speaker 1: physical groove that a stylus would travel through and vibrate
Speaker 1: as it moved through. There was no vibration with ced
Speaker 1: stylus like that. Instead, it just traveled through the groove.
Speaker 1: The groove was in a very very tight spiral, and
Speaker 1: the grooves are incredibly small. You need to have a
Speaker 1: microscope to really get a good look at the grooves
Speaker 1: on a CED disc, but they are there, and the
Speaker 1: stylust would travel through this groove and gradually move inward
Speaker 1: as it spiraled in through a really long groove on
Speaker 1: this disc, and it wouldn't vibrate it at all. It
Speaker 1: would just be guided through the groove through the walls
Speaker 1: of it itself, and it'd be the floor of the
Speaker 1: groove and the distance between that and the tip of
Speaker 1: the stylus that would determine the actual information. It became
Speaker 1: possible to put an hour's worth of material onto each
Speaker 1: side of one of these discs, but that didn't happen
Speaker 1: all at once. The early prototypes were limited to a
Speaker 1: few minutes up to half an hour of information per side.
Speaker 1: For much of the early development of the CED, the
Speaker 1: engineers demonstrated that the technology was viable, but it would
Speaker 1: only be a viable product like it was viable from
Speaker 1: a technological perspective, in the sense of it works, right,
Speaker 1: we have demonstrated this technology works. Now. The technology working
Speaker 1: is one thing, but having it work as a product
Speaker 1: is another. You have to be able to demonstrate to
Speaker 1: the customer that there's value, and without being able to
Speaker 1: record more than half an hour per side, the value
Speaker 1: just wasn't there yet, so the engineers were able to say, yes,
Speaker 1: this technology is possible, but we need to make it practical.
Speaker 1: In order to do that, we need to put more
Speaker 1: time in working on this technology, and RCA was willing
Speaker 1: to do that. And even with the final product, it
Speaker 1: would mean that customers would have to flip a disc
Speaker 1: about halfway through your standard two hour film. If a
Speaker 1: film were longer than that, you would actually need multiple discs.
Speaker 1: One other thing I should mention about these discs, RCA
Speaker 1: would not present them as discs to the consumer, Like
Speaker 1: you wouldn't take one out of a sleeve the way
Speaker 1: you would a vinyl album and then put it on
Speaker 1: a spindle and then lift a stylus and put it
Speaker 1: at the edge. That's not how this would work. These
Speaker 1: discs needed more protection than your typical vinyl album does,
Speaker 1: so RCA chose to have them fit inside plastic sleeves. Essentially,
Speaker 1: they were like cartridges. These cartridges were about the size
Speaker 1: of your standard vinyl long playing album sleeve. Like if
Speaker 1: you went out and bought an LP today, the cardboard
Speaker 1: sleeve that it comes in is about the same size
Speaker 1: by dimension as a CED cartridge. Although the cartridge would
Speaker 1: be thicker. The cartridges made the CED media kind of
Speaker 1: like very large, squareish cassettes, but inside was that grooved disc.
Speaker 1: After inserting a CED cartridge into a player, the player
Speaker 1: would extract the disc from the cartridge and the stylus
Speaker 1: would move to the end of the groove. A lot
Speaker 1: of players would then eject the empty cartridge out, and
Speaker 1: you would just remove that from the player while you
Speaker 1: watched the first half of your film. Other players kept
Speaker 1: the cartridge housed inside the player itself, because either way,
Speaker 1: after you got an hour's worth of video in the
Speaker 1: US version or seventy five minutes per side for the
Speaker 1: UK version, then you would need to remove the cartridge
Speaker 1: or replace the empty one into the machine so that
Speaker 1: it could spit the disc back inside of it. Then
Speaker 1: you would flip the cartridge over reinsert it so that
Speaker 1: you could watch the second half of the film and
Speaker 1: then go from there. I actually have memories of having
Speaker 1: to do this with Raiders of the Lost arc So
Speaker 1: keeping in mind, this is a memory that is like
Speaker 1: forty years old at this point, more than that, maybe
Speaker 1: actually probably more than forty years old, but I remember
Speaker 1: that the point where I needed to flip the cartridge
Speaker 1: was right around the same time in the film that
Speaker 1: Sala remarks the bad guys are digging in the wrong place.
Speaker 1: I just remember that being like the key phrase that
Speaker 1: meant in a second, I was gonna have to get
Speaker 1: off my butt and get over to the player and
Speaker 1: physically turn the cartridge over so that I could watch
Speaker 1: the second half of Raiders of the Lost Ark. So
Speaker 1: why did the US version, Why did that one store
Speaker 1: sixty minutes of content per side but the UK managed
Speaker 1: to cram in seventy five minutes per side. Well, that's
Speaker 1: largely because of the different formats of the US and
Speaker 1: the UK for video production and video playback, and how
Speaker 1: that impacted the tech down the line. So in the
Speaker 1: United States we use the NTSC standard for that version
Speaker 1: of video. That standard had a resolution of seven hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty by four hundred and eighty and it had
Speaker 1: a refresh rate of sixty hertz or sixty refreshes per second.
Speaker 1: The UK, however, used pal paal that has a resolution
Speaker 1: of seven twenty by five seventy six, so better resolution
Speaker 1: and a refresh rate of fifty hurtz, so a lower
Speaker 1: refresh rate. Now, this difference in standards meant that the
Speaker 1: tech to play video on US devices is usually not
Speaker 1: compatible with UK media formats unless you have something that
Speaker 1: can switch modes. That persists to this day, where you
Speaker 1: can get different region formats like I don't know if
Speaker 1: you've ever had the experience of ordering, say a DVD online,
Speaker 1: receiving it, and then finding out it doesn't work in
Speaker 1: your machine because it turns out the DVD was designed
Speaker 1: for a different regions format than whatever player you have.
Speaker 1: I've had that happen once or twice. Then I bought
Speaker 1: a region free player, which aren't They aren't very expensive,
Speaker 1: but lets me watch formats that were made in the UK,
Speaker 1: which is great because I love certain UK series that
Speaker 1: are to this day impossible to get in US formats.
Speaker 1: I'm looking at you that, Mitchell and weblook anyway for
Speaker 1: CED players. One way that this difference in formats manifests
Speaker 1: is the speed at which the discs rotate within the
Speaker 1: players themselves. So in the United States, if you were
Speaker 1: able to look inside a CED player while it was running,
Speaker 1: and if you were able to count how many times
Speaker 1: the disc rotated per minute, you would see it's at
Speaker 1: a revolution speed of four hundred and fifty revolutions per minute.
Speaker 1: In the UK it's slower, it's three hundred and seventy
Speaker 1: five revolutions per minute. Now, the size of the discs
Speaker 1: is the same in the UK as it is in
Speaker 1: the United States, but because they turn slightly more slowly
Speaker 1: in the UK, it means you can fit more information
Speaker 1: on a UK disc than you do on a US disc.
Speaker 1: The US finishes about fifteen minutes earlier USA. USA. You except,
Speaker 1: of course, you know, finishing first is not a good
Speaker 1: thing in this particular context. It just means the UK
Speaker 1: can fit more information per side than the United States,
Speaker 1: So not really a benefit in this case. Now I've
Speaker 1: described in a broad sense how these disks and the
Speaker 1: players worked. You've got this variable in capacitance that ultimately
Speaker 1: represents the information of a pre recorded video. But the
Speaker 1: process to get there was incredibly complicated, right, Like I
Speaker 1: kind of flippantly explained how this technology works. But you
Speaker 1: have to remember every decision within RCA was one that
Speaker 1: had to be arrived at through long experimentation and innovation.
Speaker 1: They had to figure out not just to use capacitance,
Speaker 1: but what materials they could use, which ones would be
Speaker 1: ideal for mass production, which ones would work well when
Speaker 1: you start designing the process for mass production, these are
Speaker 1: not simple questions to answer. If you're working with an
Speaker 1: entirely new technology, or at least one that's new enough
Speaker 1: to necessitate big advances in manufacturing processes, that's a huge endeavor.
Speaker 1: And I really want to call that out because I
Speaker 1: just think it's remarkable when you when you think about
Speaker 1: all the pieces that had to come into play for
Speaker 1: this obsolete media format to even become a thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we can make it a joke and say, oh, and
Speaker 1: it all came to nothing because the format, But I
Speaker 1: think that's the wrong way to look at it. I
Speaker 1: think the right way is to say the engineers had
Speaker 1: this one particular goal in mind, and they had to
Speaker 1: agonize over all these different decisions that would lead to
Speaker 1: the actual manifestation of that idea, and to me, that
Speaker 1: was just a phenomenal story. Anyway, this is not a
Speaker 1: simple task, right. You might find that one method that
Speaker 1: you are considering works great, like it provides a really
Speaker 1: good video experience. Maybe the video and sound are of
Speaker 1: a quality that makes them superior to some other formats
Speaker 1: that are on the market. However, you might also find
Speaker 1: out that this particular approach is far too costly to
Speaker 1: go into production. That if you were to do that,
Speaker 1: the media player and the media itself would be so
Speaker 1: expensive that no one would ever buy it. So it
Speaker 1: can't just be the technology that you're taking into consideration.
Speaker 1: The market condition end up being a real factor you
Speaker 1: have to consider as well. So they had to figure
Speaker 1: out which processes could be replicated in mass production or
Speaker 1: how much time is spent per unit being built in
Speaker 1: order to make an actual business out of it. It
Speaker 1: wasn't good enough just to figure out something that would
Speaker 1: work on a technical level. It had to be a
Speaker 1: practical consumer product as well. Meanwhile, other companies were busy
Speaker 1: developing different technologies. You know, you had Sony's umatic cassettes
Speaker 1: that I mentioned earlier. Then you had things like Beta
Speaker 1: Max and VHS cassettes from players like from JVC. JVC
Speaker 1: created VHS whereas Sony was behind Beta Max. Then you
Speaker 1: also had Phillips which was working on the laser disc format.
Speaker 1: They had started that work back in the late nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: so around the same time that RCA was working on
Speaker 1: the video disc. All of these would impact the CED's
Speaker 1: performance in the market, and that was beyond RCA's control.
Speaker 1: I mean, the company could have made the decision to
Speaker 1: pull the plug after looking at the competing formats on
Speaker 1: the market. That was a thing they could consider, but
Speaker 1: you know, they were already working with the constraints that
Speaker 1: they had for just developing the technology in the first place,
Speaker 1: and that was really the focus of the company. But
Speaker 1: complicating matters at RCA were conditions that were outside the
Speaker 1: control of any engineer who was working in the R
Speaker 1: and D lab because you had a changing of management
Speaker 1: that would impact the project itself and delay it by
Speaker 1: a couple of years. Now, if any of y'all out
Speaker 1: there have worked at a place where leadership has undergone
Speaker 1: a pretty massive change, you can probably guess the sequence
Speaker 1: of events. I'm not saying it's a universal law, but
Speaker 1: at least in my own experience, and I get it
Speaker 1: it's anecdotal, that's not evidence. But in my experience, when
Speaker 1: one set of leaders leaves and a new set tends
Speaker 1: to come in, something that frequently happens is the new
Speaker 1: set of leaders will often want to make their mark
Speaker 1: on the company, and often that also includes halting work
Speaker 1: on pre existing essentially wiping those projects out all in
Speaker 1: favor of doing something new that they are able to
Speaker 1: sign their names to and say this was my baby
Speaker 1: from beginning to end. That almost happened with RCA's video
Speaker 1: disc project. So that's going to require us to do
Speaker 1: a quick corporate history lesson. I covered this in much
Speaker 1: more detail in that sequence of episodes about RCA, but
Speaker 1: when we come back, I'll give a very quick version
Speaker 1: of what was going on in leadership that would put
Speaker 1: the video disc project into a kind of limbo for
Speaker 1: a couple of years. Now. In some ways that limbo
Speaker 1: is arguably a good thing because it gave the R
Speaker 1: and D team more time to refine the product. In
Speaker 1: other ways, it was a bad thing because it allowed
Speaker 1: competing formats on the market to further establish themselves. But
Speaker 1: we'll talk more about that once we come back from
Speaker 1: this next quick break to think our sponsors. Okay, let's
Speaker 1: get in a quick history lesson of the Radio Corporation
Speaker 1: of America. So this company formed out of a time
Speaker 1: when the United States had seized the assets of the
Speaker 1: American Marconi Company. So American Marconi operated some radio broadcast stations,
Speaker 1: not even stations centers like that was for wireless telegraphy. Essentially,
Speaker 1: we weren't yet at the time where you're talking about
Speaker 1: radio broadcast, but American Marconi owned and operated several such
Speaker 1: transmission stations in the United States. The problem was the
Speaker 1: American Marconi Company's parent company, Marconi, was headquartered in the UK,
Speaker 1: so it was a foreign owned company. Now this is
Speaker 1: getting into World War One, and once the United States
Speaker 1: gets into World War One, the military decided that it
Speaker 1: really needed control of radio telegraphy services as part of
Speaker 1: the war effort. And the initial plan was that once
Speaker 1: the war was over, the military, specifically the US Navy,
Speaker 1: would return assets to the rightful owners who owned those
Speaker 1: assets before the war. Except that did not happen because
Speaker 1: the US Navy orchestrated a handoff of those assets to
Speaker 1: a brand new all American entity RCA, and RCA would
Speaker 1: be designated to control those assets. The idea being that
Speaker 1: for something as fundamental as radio communication, you do not
Speaker 1: want a foreign company to be in charge of that.
Speaker 1: So how do you ensure that an American entity controls it? Well, first,
Speaker 1: the US Navy tried to do it themselves, but the
Speaker 1: US government said, no, that's not cool. You can't just
Speaker 1: do a power grab like that. So then the Navy said, fine,
Speaker 1: we'll make a brand new company that will ex specifically
Speaker 1: to control these assets and will essentially be a monopoly,
Speaker 1: and RCA was the product. RCA, in turn, was initially
Speaker 1: actually owned and operated by a partnership formed between multiple
Speaker 1: companies that included AT and T, General Electric, Westinghouse, and
Speaker 1: this might surprise you, the United Fruit Company really anyway,
Speaker 1: one early leader of RCA was a guy named David
Speaker 1: Sarnoff who had worked at Marconi before all of that
Speaker 1: changed everything. Now, to call Sarnoff a shrewd and ambitious
Speaker 1: businessman is an understatement. He was like a phenomenon. He
Speaker 1: took a lot of really big risks. He predicted a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff, like he was pushing for radio broadcast
Speaker 1: before anyone was even willing to consider it seriously. But
Speaker 1: he saw the potential for radio broadcast and how huge
Speaker 1: a market that could be, and most everyone else dismissed
Speaker 1: his ideas they thought them too risky. But once he
Speaker 1: was in charge of RCA, Oo boy, he went like
Speaker 1: gangbusters and he proved that he was right. And that
Speaker 1: regard I'm not saying Sarnoff was the best person in
Speaker 1: all regards, but he was certainly incredibly prescient when it
Speaker 1: came to the importance of radio communications. He led RCA
Speaker 1: as president of the company until nineteen sixty five. At
Speaker 1: that point his son, Robert Saranoff took over. David would
Speaker 1: actually remain the CEO of RCA until nineteen sixty seven,
Speaker 1: when he would retire from that. He remained chairman of
Speaker 1: the board until nineteen seventy, and his son would take
Speaker 1: over those positions as well. Interestingly, Robert Sarnoff did not
Speaker 1: initially want to work at RCA. He wanted to make
Speaker 1: a name for himself elsewhere, but he did ultimately come
Speaker 1: over through the venue of NBC, which RCA owned. You
Speaker 1: can learn more about that in those RCA episodes. So
Speaker 1: Robert Saranoff took over the reigns of RCA, and like
Speaker 1: his father, he also believed in taking risks and investing
Speaker 1: in innovation. However, his time as leader was somewhat tumultuous.
Speaker 1: RCA saw decline in its revenues. It also included a
Speaker 1: controversial decision to sell off a computer division and did
Speaker 1: so at a huge loss, and ultimately the board of
Speaker 1: directors became disenchanted with Robert Sarnoff, and in nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: five they decided to force him to step down as
Speaker 1: leader of RCA. So he didn't have any real options here.
Speaker 1: He had to step down, and in his place stepped
Speaker 1: in a guy named Anthony Conrad. Now, Conrad did not
Speaker 1: do the stereotypical move of let me wipe out everything
Speaker 1: my predecessor worked on, which was good because at this
Speaker 1: point at least good for the videos division, because the
Speaker 1: video disc was already in development by the mid nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1: In fact, it was getting close to a time when
Speaker 1: it was planned to be released to the market. Anthony
Speaker 1: Conrad continued to support the video disc operation. However, Conrad
Speaker 1: himself was not going to last very long in this
Speaker 1: position because the issue with Old Tony was while he
Speaker 1: was able to turn things around for RCA and start
Speaker 1: to improve the numbers that the board had blamed Robert
Speaker 1: Sarnoff for, he was also boosting his own value because
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy six, just a year after he took
Speaker 1: control of RCA, he had a pretty massive problem on
Speaker 1: his hands. The Internal Revenue Service, the good old IRS,
Speaker 1: was curious as to why mister Conrad had neglected to
Speaker 1: file taxes for five years in a row, and rather
Speaker 1: than explain himself to the board of directors, he abruptly
Speaker 1: stepped down as the leader of RCA. So the new
Speaker 1: leader would be a guy named Edgar Griffiths, and this
Speaker 1: is where video Disc's luck ran out on the corporate side.
Speaker 1: So again, the hope was to release the technology by
Speaker 1: the mid to late nineteen seventies, but Griffiths didn't see
Speaker 1: the benefit of the videodisc slash ced system and he
Speaker 1: slashed the budget drastically. It all but canceled the project.
Speaker 1: It did allow for continuation in R and D, but
Speaker 1: all production plans were scrapped, so videodisc was kind of
Speaker 1: in a limbo. I mean, the engineers were able to
Speaker 1: continue to refine the technology, but it wasn't slated to
Speaker 1: become a product. In late nineteen seventy eight, Fortune magazine
Speaker 1: ran a piece about Griffiths, and the majority of the
Speaker 1: piece was actually fairly complementary to griffs and his era
Speaker 1: of leadership, especially in the wake of Conrad having to
Speaker 1: step down suddenly, But the magazine seemed to suggest that
Speaker 1: he was not a risk taker that he was, you know,
Speaker 1: he was someone you could depend upon for stability, but
Speaker 1: he wasn't going to take the company into new and
Speaker 1: interesting places because he just was averse to risk. Now,
Speaker 1: whether that's burred Griffiths to reverse course on the video
Speaker 1: disc project or not, I don't know, but he did
Speaker 1: approve the project once more, and things started moving toward
Speaker 1: the development and production of a consumer video disc player
Speaker 1: and the production of pre recorded media on CED discs. Now,
Speaker 1: that delay might have been the best thing for the
Speaker 1: video disc project internally, if I'm being honest, because the
Speaker 1: version of the video disc in the mid nineteen seventies
Speaker 1: was far more primitive than what would ultimately get released
Speaker 1: to the public. The nineteen seventies era were discs that
Speaker 1: were limited to a holding about a half hour worth
Speaker 1: of content per side of the disc, and that would
Speaker 1: mean that you would need multiple discs for your average film.
Speaker 1: You would have to swap out. You wouldn't just flip
Speaker 1: discs over, You'd have to swap discs out entirely in
Speaker 1: order to watch a whole movie. Also, the materials that
Speaker 1: they were using were having some issues with stuff like corrosion,
Speaker 1: so they needed to develop different materials that could also
Speaker 1: be mass produced that would be more corrosion resistant, so
Speaker 1: the delay gave engineers time to refine their approach, switch
Speaker 1: to different materials, moved to a diamond tipped stylist. They
Speaker 1: originally were using like an emerald tip stylist I think,
Speaker 1: which worked but had less longevity to it. The diamond
Speaker 1: tip stylist was even smaller than previous versions. It meant
Speaker 1: that they could make even smaller grooves, which meant they
Speaker 1: could pack more information per side of a disc. That's
Speaker 1: what effectively doubled how much info they could pack into
Speaker 1: a side, and all that work, the engineering that creating
Speaker 1: new plastic injection molding processes, all of that allowed for
Speaker 1: the production of discs with grooves far, far, far smaller
Speaker 1: than what you would have with an audio vinyl album.
Speaker 1: Like I said, you need a microscope to really get
Speaker 1: a good look at them. It also allowed for the
Speaker 1: development of the cartridge system to protect those discs, as
Speaker 1: well as players that could accept the format. And all
Speaker 1: of that came to a point when in early nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty one, the video disc player was ready for the
Speaker 1: US market, and it wouldn't launch in the UK until
Speaker 1: two years later in nineteen eighty three. Now, RCA's original
Speaker 1: CED player, the SFT one hundred select A Vision Video
Speaker 1: Disc Player. It launched at four hundred ninety nine dollars
Speaker 1: and ninety five cents in nineteen eighty one. Now, if
Speaker 1: we adjust for inflation, that would be close to one thousand,
Speaker 1: seven hundred and seventy five bucks today, which is big
Speaker 1: old yauza. That is expensive. And again, you could not
Speaker 1: record media to the discs. You could only purchase pre
Speaker 1: recorded media, and those were mostly films, but there were
Speaker 1: also other things like collections of cartoons and short documentaries
Speaker 1: and that kind of stuff. The actual discs sold for
Speaker 1: between fourteen dollars ninety eight cents. That was largely for
Speaker 1: the stuff like the cartoons and things, up to thirty
Speaker 1: nine dollars ninety eight cents for the more deluxe multidisc sets,
Speaker 1: but most fell around twenty dollars. Again, if we adjust
Speaker 1: for inflation, that ranges out to around fifty three dollars
Speaker 1: on the low end up to one hundred and forty
Speaker 1: two dollars on the upper end. So pretty expensive to
Speaker 1: buy a single piece of media. But keep in mind
Speaker 1: that at this point RCA had invested hundreds of millions
Speaker 1: of dollars to develop and then produce the videodisc format.
Speaker 1: The price also reflected the planned longevity of the technology itself,
Speaker 1: so discs had a layer of this silicon based lubricant
Speaker 1: on them that was there in order to reduce wear
Speaker 1: and tear on the stylus inside the CD player and
Speaker 1: to extend the stylus's useful lifespan. The estimate that RCA
Speaker 1: gave was that a stylus would last for around one
Speaker 1: thousand hours of play, and that your average disc could
Speaker 1: be played around five hundred times before it would need
Speaker 1: to be replaced. And most folks, even hardcore fans, aren't
Speaker 1: going to watch the same title five hundred times, unless
Speaker 1: we're talking about like the Rocky Horror Picture Show and
Speaker 1: you've got a standing engagement every Friday at midnight. But
Speaker 1: even then we're talking like ten years of playback. Still,
Speaker 1: RCA's technology, while impressive, was largely laughed at when the
Speaker 1: video disc finally debuted. The Beta MAX and VHS formats
Speaker 1: had emerged in the nineteen seventies. They allowed not only
Speaker 1: for the ability for consumers to buy pre recorded films
Speaker 1: and TV series and that kind of stuff, but also
Speaker 1: record stuff themselves directly off the TV. You could buy
Speaker 1: a blank cassette and just record whatever you wanted, Plus
Speaker 1: you didn't have to flip the cassette over halfway through
Speaker 1: watching something. The cassette formats could hold enough video for
Speaker 1: a full film, or much more if you were willing
Speaker 1: to sacrifice fidelity in the process, because you could set
Speaker 1: the tape to record at a slower setting, and that
Speaker 1: would extend how much media you could fit per cassette,
Speaker 1: but it would mean that the quality of the recorded
Speaker 1: footage could take a bit of a hit in the process.
Speaker 1: In addition, Phillips had released the laser disc player back
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy eight, three fully before the video disc
Speaker 1: would come out. The laser disc, as the name implies,
Speaker 1: used a laser to read information off of a disc. Now,
Speaker 1: unlike CDs, DVDs, and Blu ray discs, which all use
Speaker 1: sequences of pits that are very tiny, like again you
Speaker 1: need a microscope to see them, but these pits indicate
Speaker 1: binary bits of information. They are zeros and ones. Well,
Speaker 1: the laser disc is actually an analog format, whereas CDs, DVDs,
Speaker 1: and Blu rays are all purely digital formats. The laser
Speaker 1: disc also used pits, but the spacing between those pits
Speaker 1: and the length of the pits themselves represented analog information,
Speaker 1: not binary zeros and ones. So while the laser disc
Speaker 1: format resembled the binary based optical formats of CDs and later,
Speaker 1: the actual method of encoding and decoding the information was
Speaker 1: totally different. It was more akin to what you would
Speaker 1: find in an analog vinyl record. Laser discs had so
Speaker 1: more limitations to ced systems. Depending on the format of
Speaker 1: the laser disc in question, it could hold up to
Speaker 1: an hour of material per side, so in an older
Speaker 1: laser disc player, you would have to physically flip the
Speaker 1: laser disc over halfway through playing. Now, later players would
Speaker 1: actually introduce double sided play features in the players themselves.
Speaker 1: The reading mechanism inside the player would physically move from
Speaker 1: one side to the other side of the disc, which
Speaker 1: would save you the effort of having to get up
Speaker 1: halfway through the movie. But it's still been an interruption
Speaker 1: in your viewing experience unless whatever you watched was just
Speaker 1: an hour long or shorter. But laser disc could also
Speaker 1: show a higher resolution image than video disc could, so
Speaker 1: laser disc had a horizontal resolution of four hundred and
Speaker 1: twenty five lines for NTSC based players and four forty
Speaker 1: for PAL based players. VHS resolution was at two hundred
Speaker 1: and forty lines for NTSC at least initially. While RCA
Speaker 1: didn't release actual resolution information about their format, the bandwidth
Speaker 1: on disc translates to around the same resolution as a
Speaker 1: VHS tape, so in the neighborhood of two hundred and
Speaker 1: forty horizontal lines, again as opposed to the four hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty five of LaserDisc. So yeah, CED resolution was
Speaker 1: not spectacular. Now, despite lagging in the technical stats, some
Speaker 1: video disk enthusiasts felt their chosen format was actually superior
Speaker 1: to laser disc, largely because RCA was known for doing
Speaker 1: a really good job at producing masters, that meaning the
Speaker 1: master copies of movies from which all other subsequent copies
Speaker 1: are made. So if you're copying a bad copy, then
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter how good your player is, right, it's
Speaker 1: just going to be the quality is going to be
Speaker 1: as good as the copy is and know better. So
Speaker 1: the argument that video disc enthusiasts made was that RCA
Speaker 1: was just really good at creating very clean master copies.
Speaker 1: So even though technically the video disc player could not
Speaker 1: compete with LaserDisc from a resolution standpoint. In actual use,
Speaker 1: you would get a better experience. That was the argument
Speaker 1: they made. I don't know how valid it is now.
Speaker 1: Other companies would also make their own video disc players.
Speaker 1: They licensed the technology from RCA and released them under
Speaker 1: their own brands. So, for example, the player I own
Speaker 1: is actually branded by Sears. Sears didn't make it, but
Speaker 1: they did apply their brand to it. Do you remember
Speaker 1: Sears Some of you probably do anyway, Yeah, my player
Speaker 1: is a Sears ced video disc player. Other companies also
Speaker 1: made their own versions for a couple of years anyway,
Speaker 1: But unfortunately, the video disc was up against really stiff
Speaker 1: competition and it just couldn't compete the convenience of VHS and,
Speaker 1: to a lesser extent, Beta Max the higher fidelity of
Speaker 1: laser disc. They all meant that customers did not flock
Speaker 1: to the video disc format, and at the end of
Speaker 1: the first year of production, RCA had sold around one
Speaker 1: hundred thousand units. That was a problem because the company
Speaker 1: had estimated sales twice that number, which is a big oldoof.
Speaker 1: The VCR was the main reason that the video disc
Speaker 1: player floundered. Folks could purchase a device that would let
Speaker 1: them play back pre recorded movies or actually record stuff
Speaker 1: of their own, and it cost around the same amount
Speaker 1: as a videodisc machine would. So the video disc was
Speaker 1: not able to record, you know, material, I mentioned that
Speaker 1: already you could only buy the pre recorded stuff. Plus
Speaker 1: there was a rental market that was beginning to form
Speaker 1: around VHS tapes. Pre Recorded movies were pretty darn expensive
Speaker 1: no matter what format you were talking about, but renting
Speaker 1: was relatively cheap, so rental businesses were popping up around
Speaker 1: the US, and it changed how people would access entertainment.
Speaker 1: The video disc format didn't make a significant entrance into
Speaker 1: the rental market, so again they were left behind by VHS.
Speaker 1: While RCA would introduce the player to the UK market
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty three, the company had decided to pull
Speaker 1: the plug on the format just six months later. In
Speaker 1: April nineteen eighty four, RCA made the tough decision to
Speaker 1: abandon plans to manufacture any more video disc players. The
Speaker 1: sales just didn't justify the cost of manufacturing, and in fact,
Speaker 1: RCA was going to take a major bath on the
Speaker 1: whole thing. Now, that doesn't mean everything ground to a
Speaker 1: halt in nineteen eighty four. There were still movies that
Speaker 1: were being produced in the format for a couple of years.
Speaker 1: That ended in nineteen eighty six, which is why you
Speaker 1: can actually find CED copies of movies like Back to
Speaker 1: the Future at things like thrift stores or flea markets.
Speaker 1: And Back to the Future came out in nineteen eighty five,
Speaker 1: that was a full year after RCA had stopped making
Speaker 1: video disc players. In total, the various manufacturers made around
Speaker 1: seven hundred and fifty thousand video disc players, and most
Speaker 1: of those were coming from RCA itself. According to the
Speaker 1: site cedmagic dot com, which proves that no matter what
Speaker 1: the interest is, there's a website for It has a
Speaker 1: searchable database of CED titles, and the webmaster says it
Speaker 1: contains approximately one thy seven hundred NTSCCEED titles. It also
Speaker 1: includes the database of another two hundred titles listed as vaporware,
Speaker 1: meaning the author of the website has been unable to
Speaker 1: verify that the title was actually produced in the CED format.
Speaker 1: There remains a small group of collectors and hobbyists who own, restore,
Speaker 1: and repair video disc players. As I said, I actually
Speaker 1: do own a player and a few titles, although In
Speaker 1: my case, it's because my family literally bought this thing
Speaker 1: back in the early nineteen eighties before RCA had abandoned
Speaker 1: the format. I haven't hooked mine up to a television
Speaker 1: in decades, and I suspect it probably wouldn't work if
Speaker 1: I did. I don't even know what condition the discs
Speaker 1: I own are in. I haven't popped open the cartridges
Speaker 1: to look. I would be surprised if they're in good
Speaker 1: shape because we were pretty hard on our media in my house,
Speaker 1: and at any given time, we owned as many as
Speaker 1: five cats. So with that much cat hair, even a cartridge,
Speaker 1: even a sealed system, I suspect it has had some
Speaker 1: impact to it. I don't think we're ever going to
Speaker 1: see a ced revival the way we have with vinyl,
Speaker 1: because vinyl was an established media format that lasted for
Speaker 1: decades before it took a back seat to competing formats
Speaker 1: like cassette tapes and CDs and such As I said,
Speaker 1: I should probably do a full episode on what led
Speaker 1: to the vinyl revival of the mid two thousands, because
Speaker 1: that's interesting both from a tech and a social perspective.
Speaker 1: But the video disc I think a lot of folks
Speaker 1: were unaware this format even existed, or they dismissed it
Speaker 1: out of hand. And it's not like I could recommend
Speaker 1: it versus other formats like DVDs and Blu rays. The
Speaker 1: resolution is much less impressive, the range of titles is
Speaker 1: way more limited, the aspect ratio is positively prehistoric. Gets
Speaker 1: stuck in that four to three format, and chances are
Speaker 1: the discs that you find are going to be in
Speaker 1: varying degrees of playability. But for collectors there is a
Speaker 1: certain charm to it, and for RCAA history, the technology
Speaker 1: is important because it marks an incredible era of innovation
Speaker 1: and engineering, followed by a dramatic decline in the company
Speaker 1: itself for reasons beyond just video discs spectacular failure in
Speaker 1: the market. But there you go, an epic episode about
Speaker 1: an obsolete technology, all brought to you by the fact
Speaker 1: that I happen to own one. I get that that's
Speaker 1: very biased, it's incredibly subjective, but I hope all of
Speaker 1: you out there are doing well, and I'll talk to
Speaker 1: you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,