The Tale of the RCA VideoDisc

to adults by reminding them of their childhoods. Plus, studios are run by people who are potentially thinking back to their own childhoods and how much quote unquote better it was back then. So we've seen this multiple times, right back in the nineteen seventies. If you are of an age as i am, back in the seventies and early eighties, you had movies like Greece and the far Superior Grease Too,

which were set in the late fifties early sixties. These days we see shows like Stranger Things and films like The four thirty, these are set in the nineteen eighties. We see this reflected in other ways as well. The vinyl format for LPs and such was on its way toward extinction with the introduction of other technologies like compact discs CDs did a number on Vinyl as well as audio cassette tapes, but then in the mid two thousands,

Vinyl began to mold a comeback. These days, Vinyl's a booming business again, and the reasons for that are varied, from the mythology of audio files about the superiority of the Vinyl format to the desire to actually own a copy of music rather than be beholden to some streaming service that may or may not carry that music. In the future, and I'll probably do a full episode about the Vinyl revival and kind of trace how that came to be, because I think that's a pretty interesting story.

But as I was thinking about all this, I decided I should do another episode about obsolete media. Now. Originally I was going to do a round up episode with several different intrees, several different examples of obsolete media. I've done some of these in the past, and in fact I had to go and take a look back on past episodes to figure out what technologies I had already covered. I've done it a lot. In fact, I have an episode from just two years ago that went into detail

about obsolete formats that I had completely forgotten about. Like I remembered I had done episodes about obsolete media, but I didn't remember that it was just two years ago when I did a big one. In that one, I covered stuff like the umatic video cassette, which Sony was pushing out as a consumer product, but it mainly saw use in broadcast studios, not in consumer technology. Instead, the VHS and Betamax formats would take over that market, or

the tefifon or tefifhone format tefi fon. Took me a while to track that down because it didn't spell it in that episode from twenty twenty two, but that was a media format out of West Germany or what was West Germany at that time, and I dedicated about a third of the episode to this tech back in twenty twenty two and forgot about it. It's really cool though. It uses a ribbon of plastic and a groove kind of like what you would find on a record album,

and the plastic tape that's inside these cassettes. It's in a loop, so it does loop all the way back around. You don't have to rewind to the beginning or anything. It was a neat technology, just didn't see much use outside of Germany. But in previous episodes, I've also talked about the organette, which is a device that works in a way that's similar to a player piano. I talked about wire recorders, where the recording medium was literally a

length of stainless steel wire. But in this episode, I'm going to talk about a device that I've mentioned a couple times before, but I have never dedicated a full episode to it. And I'm doing this purely out of nostalgia because I actually own one of these devices. In fact, it's sitting immediately to my right as I am recording this episode, and the tech is the RCA CED player, or more officially, the RCA videodisc system. And I should probably have warned you that this episode's going to have

some alphabet soup stuff going on. But RCA stands for the Radio Corporation of America. That was a company that had an absolutely critical role to play in the production of media here in the United States. RCA's history is one that includes dominating radio broadcasts and being a huge player in the early recording industry, as well as much more. Now I've done episodes about RCA. In fact, I did a series of I think four episodes about the history

and evolution of RCA back in twenty nineteen. Because again, this company is huge, it has a very long history, and it has had a massive impact on the evolution of technology in tons of different ways. However, the CED player, I would argue, would not rank among those massive influences on technology. CED stands for capacitance Electronic disc and I'll

explain why a little bit later. But first some history, which is a bit complicated, as one of the best accounts about the CED is stored on the CED format itself, and since CED is an obsolete medium, it stanged hard to get access to that material. Gosh, if only the format hadn't gone obsolete, I could learn more about this obsolete format, or at least that would be the case. We're in not for the fact that YouTube exists, and of course people have created YouTube videos of that recorded

material that was originally only on CED. The channel I got access to this material from was the media Hoarder. They posted a historical video on YouTube. So RCA actually made a video disc or CED for its own employees who had worked on the player. So these are people within RCA who had dedicated their time and efforts into the creation of this technology, and RCA wanted to acknowledge

them and to say, y'all did amazing work. Even though the product ultimately failed in the marketplace, the technological achievements were really substantial. And this ced that RCA made for RCA employees was titled Memories of Video disc So this was already when the format was on the way out, and that format only lasted a couple of years after

being introduced. And I just think that's pretty neat. You know that a company would actually spend the resources to make a record of the work that folks had done on a technology that ultimately was a market failure. Like most companies' do that, right, They wouldn't take the time and spend the money to create a record of this and to say this is an exploration of the work and effort and innovation that went into this technology. They

just wouldn't do it. They would kind of like mark it off the books and try to move on as fast as possible. But anyway, the story actually begins in the nineteen fifties when RCA engineers, led by a guy named Thomas Stanley, began to experiment with ways to record not just audio, but also video onto grooved discs like vinyl record albums. So RCAA had been a really important

company during the early days of record players. They bought the Victor Talking Machine Company and became RCA Victor, so that was a massive move, Victor being like the oldest company to produce gramophones or phonographs, and RCA even introduced a thirty three and a third RPM format before World War Two, so RPM being revolutions per minute, most records

were at seventy eight RPM. It was challenging playing records at slower RPMs, which would allow you to fit more material per side of a record, but it also meant that the quality of the audio played back would often take a hit. Right faster RPMs you typically would get better audio quality, but you could fit less material per side. Slower you could fit more material, but the quality wasn't as good. RCA had created a thirty three and a

third format leading up to World War Two. Actually, I think it was around nineteen thirty when they introduced that, and this version of thirty three and a third was different from the post war format. After the war, you had Columbia Records, which introduced micro grooves and allowed for the LP or long playing format. So while RCA did have a thirty three and a third version, it wasn't an LP album. It couldn't fit as much information as

a microgroove record would later on, but it was still neat. Unfortunately, the record players that had a thirty three and a third speed available to them were exorbitantly expensive, and it was the middle of the Great Depression, and as you might imagine, those two factors together meant this particular medium

didn't get much traction in the market. But RCAA engineers were really well acquainted with the concept of encoding information within the groove of a rotatable disc and using a stylus to pick up that information, convert that information into an electric signal, and then amplify that signal so it could be played back as audio on an electronic device.

While RCAA would engage in fierce competition against rivals like Columbia Records, giving rise to a format war that ultimately ended in a truce, it would also continue to innovate with this kind of technology. So by the late night teen fifties, the thinking was that if a grooved album can hold the information necessary for audio playback. When used with the proper turntable and stylus, it could potentially do

so even for other kinds of information. With a fine enough stylus and precise grooves that were of a small enough form factor, you could presumably include data that encoded not just an audio signal, but a video signal as well. Initial work was sporadic, but in nineteen sixty four a pair of engineers named Eugene Kaiser and John Clemens tackled this problem in earnest But how would you encode the information?

Physical grooves would need to be incredibly precise, and the stylust would have to be unbelievably tiny or fine pointed. The folks at RCA came up with the idea of using capacitance. So capacitance is the capability of a conductor to store an electrical charge, and using a pair of such conductors, you can measure the difference of a separated electric charge between the two of them, a difference in voltage. In other words, lots of variables determine this difference in voltage.

For example, the plate area of the two capacitors is a factor how much overlap is between the two plates that affects the difference in voltage between them. So if you were to move the plates relative to one another to change the amount of overlap, you actually change the difference in voltage as well. Another variable is applied voltage, So obviously, if you change the voltage that is applied to one capacitor, it's going to affect the difference in

voltage between it and a second capacitor. But another variable is distance. If you change the distance between the two separated capacitors, they will register a change in voltage. So if you keep all other variables constant and the only thing you allow to change is the distance between the capacitors, you can use that as your encoding mechanism for data. And that was the secret to the CED. The disc

would have a layer of carbon on it. This is a conductive material, and inside the grooves of the disc, if you could get in there, like the trench of the Death Star in Star Wars, you would see that the floor of that groove had little peaks and valleys. The floor would come up at some points and dip down in other points. Now, the stylus on a CED player had a titanium electrode tip on it. It was usually a diamond tipped stylus with a titanium electrode at

the very tip. Now, the size of the stylus was such that it would fit into a groove, but the stylus wasn't so long that it would actually touch the floor of the groove. So the tip of the stylus is suspended above the groove's floor, and the peaks and valleys of the groove meant the floor would change the distance between the floor itself and the titanium electrode on the tip of that stylus, and that was changing the distance between two capacitors, which resulted in a difference in

the voltage red by the stylus. Ultimately, this would be the signal that would be sent to the player, which would then decode the signal and send it on to a television set, and then you could watch your copy of you know, Singing in the Rain or Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Arc. I named both of those titles because I know they appeared on CED, because I have those titles. Those are two of the films I actually own on CED, so that's why I chose them.

I was confident that they exist and This was really a brilliant move because switching from physical vibrations. I mean, that's how your regular vinyl records work, right. A stylus goes through this groove. There are ridges and things cut into the groove. The stylus or needle vibrates as it travels through this groove. Those vibrations get transformed into an electrical signal which then is amplified and sent to speakers

and played back as audio. You know, that's all physical, but by going to capacitance, it allowed for the possibility of video because you were able to have much more precise encoding in a very dense format. I'll talk more about it, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. Before the break, I was talking about how capacitance allowed for more data density than a purely physical groove that a stylus would travel through and vibrate

as it moved through. There was no vibration with ced stylus like that. Instead, it just traveled through the groove. The groove was in a very very tight spiral, and the grooves are incredibly small. You need to have a microscope to really get a good look at the grooves on a CED disc, but they are there, and the stylust would travel through this groove and gradually move inward as it spiraled in through a really long groove on

this disc, and it wouldn't vibrate it at all. It would just be guided through the groove through the walls of it itself, and it'd be the floor of the groove and the distance between that and the tip of the stylus that would determine the actual information. It became possible to put an hour's worth of material onto each side of one of these discs, but that didn't happen all at once. The early prototypes were limited to a few minutes up to half an hour of information per side.

For much of the early development of the CED, the engineers demonstrated that the technology was viable, but it would only be a viable product like it was viable from a technological perspective, in the sense of it works, right, we have demonstrated this technology works. Now. The technology working is one thing, but having it work as a product

is another. You have to be able to demonstrate to the customer that there's value, and without being able to record more than half an hour per side, the value just wasn't there yet, so the engineers were able to say, yes, this technology is possible, but we need to make it practical. In order to do that, we need to put more time in working on this technology, and RCA was willing to do that. And even with the final product, it would mean that customers would have to flip a disc

about halfway through your standard two hour film. If a film were longer than that, you would actually need multiple discs. One other thing I should mention about these discs, RCA would not present them as discs to the consumer, Like you wouldn't take one out of a sleeve the way you would a vinyl album and then put it on a spindle and then lift a stylus and put it at the edge. That's not how this would work. These discs needed more protection than your typical vinyl album does,

so RCA chose to have them fit inside plastic sleeves. Essentially, they were like cartridges. These cartridges were about the size of your standard vinyl long playing album sleeve. Like if you went out and bought an LP today, the cardboard sleeve that it comes in is about the same size by dimension as a CED cartridge. Although the cartridge would be thicker. The cartridges made the CED media kind of like very large, squareish cassettes, but inside was that grooved disc.

After inserting a CED cartridge into a player, the player would extract the disc from the cartridge and the stylus would move to the end of the groove. A lot of players would then eject the empty cartridge out, and you would just remove that from the player while you

watched the first half of your film. Other players kept the cartridge housed inside the player itself, because either way, after you got an hour's worth of video in the US version or seventy five minutes per side for the UK version, then you would need to remove the cartridge or replace the empty one into the machine so that it could spit the disc back inside of it. Then you would flip the cartridge over reinsert it so that you could watch the second half of the film and

then go from there. I actually have memories of having to do this with Raiders of the Lost arc So keeping in mind, this is a memory that is like forty years old at this point, more than that, maybe actually probably more than forty years old, but I remember that the point where I needed to flip the cartridge was right around the same time in the film that Sala remarks the bad guys are digging in the wrong place.

I just remember that being like the key phrase that meant in a second, I was gonna have to get off my butt and get over to the player and physically turn the cartridge over so that I could watch the second half of Raiders of the Lost Ark. So why did the US version, Why did that one store sixty minutes of content per side but the UK managed

to cram in seventy five minutes per side. Well, that's largely because of the different formats of the US and the UK for video production and video playback, and how that impacted the tech down the line. So in the United States we use the NTSC standard for that version of video. That standard had a resolution of seven hundred and twenty by four hundred and eighty and it had a refresh rate of sixty hertz or sixty refreshes per second.

The UK, however, used pal paal that has a resolution of seven twenty by five seventy six, so better resolution and a refresh rate of fifty hurtz, so a lower refresh rate. Now, this difference in standards meant that the tech to play video on US devices is usually not compatible with UK media formats unless you have something that

can switch modes. That persists to this day, where you can get different region formats like I don't know if you've ever had the experience of ordering, say a DVD online, receiving it, and then finding out it doesn't work in your machine because it turns out the DVD was designed for a different regions format than whatever player you have.

I've had that happen once or twice. Then I bought a region free player, which aren't They aren't very expensive, but lets me watch formats that were made in the UK, which is great because I love certain UK series that are to this day impossible to get in US formats. I'm looking at you that, Mitchell and weblook anyway for CED players. One way that this difference in formats manifests is the speed at which the discs rotate within the

players themselves. So in the United States, if you were able to look inside a CED player while it was running, and if you were able to count how many times the disc rotated per minute, you would see it's at a revolution speed of four hundred and fifty revolutions per minute. In the UK it's slower, it's three hundred and seventy

five revolutions per minute. Now, the size of the discs is the same in the UK as it is in the United States, but because they turn slightly more slowly in the UK, it means you can fit more information on a UK disc than you do on a US disc. The US finishes about fifteen minutes earlier USA. USA. You except, of course, you know, finishing first is not a good thing in this particular context. It just means the UK can fit more information per side than the United States,

So not really a benefit in this case. Now I've described in a broad sense how these disks and the players worked. You've got this variable in capacitance that ultimately represents the information of a pre recorded video. But the process to get there was incredibly complicated, right, Like I kind of flippantly explained how this technology works. But you have to remember every decision within RCA was one that had to be arrived at through long experimentation and innovation.

They had to figure out not just to use capacitance, but what materials they could use, which ones would be ideal for mass production, which ones would work well when you start designing the process for mass production, these are not simple questions to answer. If you're working with an entirely new technology, or at least one that's new enough to necessitate big advances in manufacturing processes, that's a huge endeavor.

And I really want to call that out because I just think it's remarkable when you when you think about all the pieces that had to come into play for this obsolete media format to even become a thing. Yeah, we can make it a joke and say, oh, and it all came to nothing because the format, But I

think that's the wrong way to look at it. I think the right way is to say the engineers had this one particular goal in mind, and they had to agonize over all these different decisions that would lead to the actual manifestation of that idea, and to me, that was just a phenomenal story. Anyway, this is not a simple task, right. You might find that one method that you are considering works great, like it provides a really

good video experience. Maybe the video and sound are of a quality that makes them superior to some other formats that are on the market. However, you might also find out that this particular approach is far too costly to go into production. That if you were to do that, the media player and the media itself would be so expensive that no one would ever buy it. So it can't just be the technology that you're taking into consideration. The market condition end up being a real factor you

have to consider as well. So they had to figure out which processes could be replicated in mass production or how much time is spent per unit being built in order to make an actual business out of it. It wasn't good enough just to figure out something that would work on a technical level. It had to be a practical consumer product as well. Meanwhile, other companies were busy developing different technologies. You know, you had Sony's umatic cassettes

that I mentioned earlier. Then you had things like Beta Max and VHS cassettes from players like from JVC. JVC created VHS whereas Sony was behind Beta Max. Then you also had Phillips which was working on the laser disc format. They had started that work back in the late nineteen sixties, so around the same time that RCA was working on the video disc. All of these would impact the CED's performance in the market, and that was beyond RCA's control.

I mean, the company could have made the decision to pull the plug after looking at the competing formats on the market. That was a thing they could consider, but you know, they were already working with the constraints that they had for just developing the technology in the first place,

and that was really the focus of the company. But complicating matters at RCA were conditions that were outside the control of any engineer who was working in the R and D lab because you had a changing of management that would impact the project itself and delay it by a couple of years. Now, if any of y'all out there have worked at a place where leadership has undergone a pretty massive change, you can probably guess the sequence

of events. I'm not saying it's a universal law, but at least in my own experience, and I get it

it's anecdotal, that's not evidence. But in my experience, when one set of leaders leaves and a new set tends to come in, something that frequently happens is the new set of leaders will often want to make their mark on the company, and often that also includes halting work on pre existing essentially wiping those projects out all in favor of doing something new that they are able to sign their names to and say this was my baby from beginning to end. That almost happened with RCA's video

disc project. So that's going to require us to do a quick corporate history lesson. I covered this in much more detail in that sequence of episodes about RCA, but when we come back, I'll give a very quick version of what was going on in leadership that would put the video disc project into a kind of limbo for a couple of years. Now. In some ways that limbo is arguably a good thing because it gave the R

and D team more time to refine the product. In other ways, it was a bad thing because it allowed competing formats on the market to further establish themselves. But we'll talk more about that once we come back from this next quick break to think our sponsors. Okay, let's get in a quick history lesson of the Radio Corporation of America. So this company formed out of a time when the United States had seized the assets of the

American Marconi Company. So American Marconi operated some radio broadcast stations, not even stations centers like that was for wireless telegraphy. Essentially, we weren't yet at the time where you're talking about radio broadcast, but American Marconi owned and operated several such transmission stations in the United States. The problem was the American Marconi Company's parent company, Marconi, was headquartered in the UK,

so it was a foreign owned company. Now this is getting into World War One, and once the United States gets into World War One, the military decided that it really needed control of radio telegraphy services as part of the war effort. And the initial plan was that once the war was over, the military, specifically the US Navy, would return assets to the rightful owners who owned those

assets before the war. Except that did not happen because the US Navy orchestrated a handoff of those assets to a brand new all American entity RCA, and RCA would be designated to control those assets. The idea being that for something as fundamental as radio communication, you do not want a foreign company to be in charge of that. So how do you ensure that an American entity controls it? Well, first, the US Navy tried to do it themselves, but the

US government said, no, that's not cool. You can't just do a power grab like that. So then the Navy said, fine, we'll make a brand new company that will ex specifically to control these assets and will essentially be a monopoly,

and RCA was the product. RCA, in turn, was initially actually owned and operated by a partnership formed between multiple companies that included AT and T, General Electric, Westinghouse, and this might surprise you, the United Fruit Company really anyway, one early leader of RCA was a guy named David Sarnoff who had worked at Marconi before all of that changed everything. Now, to call Sarnoff a shrewd and ambitious businessman is an understatement. He was like a phenomenon. He

took a lot of really big risks. He predicted a lot of stuff, like he was pushing for radio broadcast before anyone was even willing to consider it seriously. But he saw the potential for radio broadcast and how huge a market that could be, and most everyone else dismissed his ideas they thought them too risky. But once he was in charge of RCA, Oo boy, he went like

gangbusters and he proved that he was right. And that regard I'm not saying Sarnoff was the best person in all regards, but he was certainly incredibly prescient when it came to the importance of radio communications. He led RCA as president of the company until nineteen sixty five. At that point his son, Robert Saranoff took over. David would actually remain the CEO of RCA until nineteen sixty seven,

when he would retire from that. He remained chairman of the board until nineteen seventy, and his son would take over those positions as well. Interestingly, Robert Sarnoff did not initially want to work at RCA. He wanted to make a name for himself elsewhere, but he did ultimately come over through the venue of NBC, which RCA owned. You

can learn more about that in those RCA episodes. So Robert Saranoff took over the reigns of RCA, and like his father, he also believed in taking risks and investing in innovation. However, his time as leader was somewhat tumultuous.

RCA saw decline in its revenues. It also included a controversial decision to sell off a computer division and did so at a huge loss, and ultimately the board of directors became disenchanted with Robert Sarnoff, and in nineteen seventy five they decided to force him to step down as leader of RCA. So he didn't have any real options here. He had to step down, and in his place stepped

in a guy named Anthony Conrad. Now, Conrad did not do the stereotypical move of let me wipe out everything my predecessor worked on, which was good because at this point at least good for the videos division, because the video disc was already in development by the mid nineteen seventies. In fact, it was getting close to a time when it was planned to be released to the market. Anthony

Conrad continued to support the video disc operation. However, Conrad himself was not going to last very long in this position because the issue with Old Tony was while he was able to turn things around for RCA and start to improve the numbers that the board had blamed Robert Sarnoff for, he was also boosting his own value because in nineteen seventy six, just a year after he took control of RCA, he had a pretty massive problem on

his hands. The Internal Revenue Service, the good old IRS, was curious as to why mister Conrad had neglected to file taxes for five years in a row, and rather than explain himself to the board of directors, he abruptly stepped down as the leader of RCA. So the new leader would be a guy named Edgar Griffiths, and this is where video Disc's luck ran out on the corporate side.

So again, the hope was to release the technology by the mid to late nineteen seventies, but Griffiths didn't see the benefit of the videodisc slash ced system and he slashed the budget drastically. It all but canceled the project. It did allow for continuation in R and D, but all production plans were scrapped, so videodisc was kind of in a limbo. I mean, the engineers were able to continue to refine the technology, but it wasn't slated to

become a product. In late nineteen seventy eight, Fortune magazine ran a piece about Griffiths, and the majority of the piece was actually fairly complementary to griffs and his era of leadership, especially in the wake of Conrad having to step down suddenly, But the magazine seemed to suggest that he was not a risk taker that he was, you know, he was someone you could depend upon for stability, but he wasn't going to take the company into new and

interesting places because he just was averse to risk. Now, whether that's burred Griffiths to reverse course on the video disc project or not, I don't know, but he did approve the project once more, and things started moving toward the development and production of a consumer video disc player

and the production of pre recorded media on CED discs. Now, that delay might have been the best thing for the video disc project internally, if I'm being honest, because the version of the video disc in the mid nineteen seventies was far more primitive than what would ultimately get released

to the public. The nineteen seventies era were discs that were limited to a holding about a half hour worth of content per side of the disc, and that would mean that you would need multiple discs for your average film. You would have to swap out. You wouldn't just flip discs over, You'd have to swap discs out entirely in

order to watch a whole movie. Also, the materials that they were using were having some issues with stuff like corrosion, so they needed to develop different materials that could also be mass produced that would be more corrosion resistant, so the delay gave engineers time to refine their approach, switch to different materials, moved to a diamond tipped stylist. They originally were using like an emerald tip stylist I think, which worked but had less longevity to it. The diamond

tip stylist was even smaller than previous versions. It meant that they could make even smaller grooves, which meant they could pack more information per side of a disc. That's what effectively doubled how much info they could pack into a side, and all that work, the engineering that creating new plastic injection molding processes, all of that allowed for the production of discs with grooves far, far, far smaller than what you would have with an audio vinyl album.

Like I said, you need a microscope to really get a good look at them. It also allowed for the development of the cartridge system to protect those discs, as well as players that could accept the format. And all of that came to a point when in early nineteen eighty one, the video disc player was ready for the US market, and it wouldn't launch in the UK until two years later in nineteen eighty three. Now, RCA's original CED player, the SFT one hundred select A Vision Video

Disc Player. It launched at four hundred ninety nine dollars and ninety five cents in nineteen eighty one. Now, if we adjust for inflation, that would be close to one thousand, seven hundred and seventy five bucks today, which is big old yauza. That is expensive. And again, you could not record media to the discs. You could only purchase pre recorded media, and those were mostly films, but there were also other things like collections of cartoons and short documentaries

and that kind of stuff. The actual discs sold for between fourteen dollars ninety eight cents. That was largely for the stuff like the cartoons and things, up to thirty nine dollars ninety eight cents for the more deluxe multidisc sets, but most fell around twenty dollars. Again, if we adjust for inflation, that ranges out to around fifty three dollars on the low end up to one hundred and forty two dollars on the upper end. So pretty expensive to

buy a single piece of media. But keep in mind that at this point RCA had invested hundreds of millions of dollars to develop and then produce the videodisc format. The price also reflected the planned longevity of the technology itself, so discs had a layer of this silicon based lubricant on them that was there in order to reduce wear and tear on the stylus inside the CD player and

to extend the stylus's useful lifespan. The estimate that RCA gave was that a stylus would last for around one thousand hours of play, and that your average disc could be played around five hundred times before it would need to be replaced. And most folks, even hardcore fans, aren't going to watch the same title five hundred times, unless we're talking about like the Rocky Horror Picture Show and you've got a standing engagement every Friday at midnight. But

even then we're talking like ten years of playback. Still, RCA's technology, while impressive, was largely laughed at when the video disc finally debuted. The Beta MAX and VHS formats had emerged in the nineteen seventies. They allowed not only for the ability for consumers to buy pre recorded films and TV series and that kind of stuff, but also

record stuff themselves directly off the TV. You could buy a blank cassette and just record whatever you wanted, Plus you didn't have to flip the cassette over halfway through

watching something. The cassette formats could hold enough video for a full film, or much more if you were willing to sacrifice fidelity in the process, because you could set the tape to record at a slower setting, and that would extend how much media you could fit per cassette, but it would mean that the quality of the recorded footage could take a bit of a hit in the process.

In addition, Phillips had released the laser disc player back in nineteen seventy eight, three fully before the video disc would come out. The laser disc, as the name implies, used a laser to read information off of a disc. Now, unlike CDs, DVDs, and Blu ray discs, which all use sequences of pits that are very tiny, like again you need a microscope to see them, but these pits indicate

binary bits of information. They are zeros and ones. Well, the laser disc is actually an analog format, whereas CDs, DVDs, and Blu rays are all purely digital formats. The laser disc also used pits, but the spacing between those pits and the length of the pits themselves represented analog information, not binary zeros and ones. So while the laser disc format resembled the binary based optical formats of CDs and later, the actual method of encoding and decoding the information was

totally different. It was more akin to what you would find in an analog vinyl record. Laser discs had so more limitations to ced systems. Depending on the format of the laser disc in question, it could hold up to an hour of material per side, so in an older laser disc player, you would have to physically flip the laser disc over halfway through playing. Now, later players would actually introduce double sided play features in the players themselves.

The reading mechanism inside the player would physically move from one side to the other side of the disc, which would save you the effort of having to get up halfway through the movie. But it's still been an interruption in your viewing experience unless whatever you watched was just

an hour long or shorter. But laser disc could also show a higher resolution image than video disc could, so laser disc had a horizontal resolution of four hundred and twenty five lines for NTSC based players and four forty for PAL based players. VHS resolution was at two hundred

and forty lines for NTSC at least initially. While RCA didn't release actual resolution information about their format, the bandwidth on disc translates to around the same resolution as a VHS tape, so in the neighborhood of two hundred and forty horizontal lines, again as opposed to the four hundred and twenty five of LaserDisc. So yeah, CED resolution was

not spectacular. Now, despite lagging in the technical stats, some video disk enthusiasts felt their chosen format was actually superior to laser disc, largely because RCA was known for doing a really good job at producing masters, that meaning the master copies of movies from which all other subsequent copies are made. So if you're copying a bad copy, then it doesn't matter how good your player is, right, it's just going to be the quality is going to be

as good as the copy is and know better. So the argument that video disc enthusiasts made was that RCA was just really good at creating very clean master copies. So even though technically the video disc player could not compete with LaserDisc from a resolution standpoint. In actual use, you would get a better experience. That was the argument they made. I don't know how valid it is now. Other companies would also make their own video disc players.

They licensed the technology from RCA and released them under their own brands. So, for example, the player I own is actually branded by Sears. Sears didn't make it, but they did apply their brand to it. Do you remember Sears Some of you probably do anyway, Yeah, my player

is a Sears ced video disc player. Other companies also made their own versions for a couple of years anyway, But unfortunately, the video disc was up against really stiff competition and it just couldn't compete the convenience of VHS and, to a lesser extent, Beta Max the higher fidelity of laser disc. They all meant that customers did not flock to the video disc format, and at the end of the first year of production, RCA had sold around one

hundred thousand units. That was a problem because the company had estimated sales twice that number, which is a big oldoof. The VCR was the main reason that the video disc player floundered. Folks could purchase a device that would let them play back pre recorded movies or actually record stuff of their own, and it cost around the same amount as a videodisc machine would. So the video disc was not able to record, you know, material, I mentioned that

already you could only buy the pre recorded stuff. Plus there was a rental market that was beginning to form around VHS tapes. Pre Recorded movies were pretty darn expensive no matter what format you were talking about, but renting was relatively cheap, so rental businesses were popping up around the US, and it changed how people would access entertainment. The video disc format didn't make a significant entrance into the rental market, so again they were left behind by VHS.

While RCA would introduce the player to the UK market in nineteen eighty three, the company had decided to pull the plug on the format just six months later. In April nineteen eighty four, RCA made the tough decision to abandon plans to manufacture any more video disc players. The sales just didn't justify the cost of manufacturing, and in fact, RCA was going to take a major bath on the whole thing. Now, that doesn't mean everything ground to a

halt in nineteen eighty four. There were still movies that were being produced in the format for a couple of years. That ended in nineteen eighty six, which is why you can actually find CED copies of movies like Back to the Future at things like thrift stores or flea markets. And Back to the Future came out in nineteen eighty five, that was a full year after RCA had stopped making

video disc players. In total, the various manufacturers made around seven hundred and fifty thousand video disc players, and most of those were coming from RCA itself. According to the site cedmagic dot com, which proves that no matter what the interest is, there's a website for It has a searchable database of CED titles, and the webmaster says it

contains approximately one thy seven hundred NTSCCEED titles. It also includes the database of another two hundred titles listed as vaporware, meaning the author of the website has been unable to verify that the title was actually produced in the CED format. There remains a small group of collectors and hobbyists who own, restore,

and repair video disc players. As I said, I actually do own a player and a few titles, although In my case, it's because my family literally bought this thing back in the early nineteen eighties before RCA had abandoned the format. I haven't hooked mine up to a television in decades, and I suspect it probably wouldn't work if I did. I don't even know what condition the discs I own are in. I haven't popped open the cartridges

to look. I would be surprised if they're in good shape because we were pretty hard on our media in my house, and at any given time, we owned as many as five cats. So with that much cat hair, even a cartridge, even a sealed system, I suspect it has had some

impact to it. I don't think we're ever going to see a ced revival the way we have with vinyl, because vinyl was an established media format that lasted for decades before it took a back seat to competing formats like cassette tapes and CDs and such As I said, I should probably do a full episode on what led to the vinyl revival of the mid two thousands, because that's interesting both from a tech and a social perspective.

But the video disc I think a lot of folks were unaware this format even existed, or they dismissed it out of hand. And it's not like I could recommend it versus other formats like DVDs and Blu rays. The resolution is much less impressive, the range of titles is way more limited, the aspect ratio is positively prehistoric. Gets stuck in that four to three format, and chances are the discs that you find are going to be in

varying degrees of playability. But for collectors there is a certain charm to it, and for RCAA history, the technology is important because it marks an incredible era of innovation and engineering, followed by a dramatic decline in the company itself for reasons beyond just video discs spectacular failure in the market. But there you go, an epic episode about an obsolete technology, all brought to you by the fact

that I happen to own one. I get that that's very biased, it's incredibly subjective, but I hope all of you out there are doing well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,