Tracking Changes in Media: VCRs and CDs

as well as our relationship to entertainment. And in the previous three episodes, I traced the origins of recorded media, the birth of the radio, film, and television industries, and the rise of the humble audio cassette. And we've seen that entertainment was gradually transitioning from something you could only experience in the moment, such as when a radio station would play a song or a theater would show a film.

And now we're in an age in which you could you could own a permanent record of some of those things. Now I've covered music up through the cassette era, so we're going to switch back over to television and film a bit and the birth of the video cassette. Now, one of the challenges in early television was how do you broadcast a television program to a national market, most broadcasts were done live, and that limited your your options.

The United States is a really big country, so if you did broadcast a show live, let's say that you've worked out all the technical details, you still have time as a factor. Because the two coasts of the United States are in time zones, there are three hours apart from each other, so prime time for one coast isn't

prime time for the other coast. Also, you were limited in transmission range, and in the days before massive cable companies had connected different regions using cable and satellites, you had limited options. So it would be better if you could find a a to record a show and then broadcast it at a different time slot for other markets.

And most shows were being shot in New York, so if you wanted to have a show in New York air in Los Angeles, it made more sense to record the show in New York and then send that recording, perhaps even via cable, out to broadcast stations in Los Angeles, which would then broadcast it. So you still have to figure out a way to record the show you were actually doing, and recording a show was easier said than done.

Television cameras and monitor technology was best suited for live broadcast, so you would use a camera to capture images, but send that signal directly to a transmitter and blasted out over radio waves, and then television sets all over the region would pick up those transmissions and show the live broadcast right then and there. Before the invention of videotape, one work around for this was the kinescope. This was

not an ideal solution. Basically, you would take a film camera, kind of like the ones you would use to shoot a movie, and it was typically either a sixteen millimeter or a thirty five millimeter film camera, and you would put it behind a television monitor. You would point it at the TV monitor, so you would be shooting a program on television cameras, and the monitor would actually be displaying the image live on it, and then you would use a film camera to capture the image of that

which was on the monitor screen. So viewers at home, at least outside the region that you're directly serving, would actually be looking at a picture of a picture. It's as if you were to play a YouTube video on your computer and then you use your phone's camera to stream that video to someone else. It's not ideal. One other thing had to be done for this to work. By the way, the cameras actually had to be synchronized to the monitors scanning rate. So you might remember I've

talked about this in other episodes. Cathode ray tube monitors paint screens line by line from the top to the bottom. So they paint a horizontal line, they move down, they paint the next horizontal line. Technically they could paint every other line and then do a second frame where they're doing the other lines. So you do the all the oddlines first, then all the even lines. But you get the idea. It's the sequence of painting lines. Now it's done so quickly that our brains can't process this. We

just see unbroken moving images. We don't see a series of lines being painted on a screen. But if you have a film camera that isn't synchronized with the scanning rate, then you can pick up an artifact. Typically we see this as sort of a rolling horizontal line moving across

the television screen in regular cycles. If you've ever seen any real cheap productions that especially like home videos or something that are pointed at a TV screen and you see this weird line scanning across the screen over and over again. That's what we're seeing. You're seeing this, uh, the scan line or representa of that scan line. Because the cycle of the camera is different from the scan cycle of the monitor. Synchronizing the film camera to the

monitor scanning rate eliminated that artifact. The pictures were still not great. They were grainy, They left a lot to be desired, They could be kind of dark, be hard to see what's going on. New York citizens typically got a pretty darn good image because so much television production was happening in New York City. So if you happen to live near New York, you were getting the live

broadcast version. You were not getting the kiniscope version. But if you lived in a different time zone, chances are you were watching a kiniscope of those programs, and that was pretty common in the nineteen forties and early nineteen fifties. Sadly, a lot of kinscopes of early television programs have since been lost. There wasn't much thought given to preserving television programs. Early on TV studios were more concerned with churning out

content than keeping the stuff that they had. Are He made and most stuff would just be broadcast live as it happened in its home region and then only used for rebroadcast for other time zones. It wasn't used for any kind of rebroadcast of the original program, and once it was done, it was time to move on. So there was no real thought to stuff like syndication, and the idea of home theater wasn't a thing for a couple of decades. No one was thinking about how can

I watch the stuff at home on demand? So there's a ton of stuff that was shown that we know about but that we have no known recordings of. Um. This isn't just to the United States. That's happened in other places as well. In the United Kingdom, the BBC was actually famous for not holding on to stuff that future generations thought of as being historically important, but at

the time no one was really thinking about that. Even in the days of videotape, once that became a thing, the BBC was known for saving money by taping over old videotape. There are a lot of stories about different shows that survived that fate simply by purchasing the tapes directly. Monty Pythons Flying Circus is one of those, Eric Idol actually spent the money to buy the original tapes so that the BBC wouldn't tape over them anyway. There were

a few exceptions to the kinescope approach. In n the sitcom I Love Lucy broke new ground by filming every episode using three film cameras, the classic three camera set up for sitcoms, and they used those instead of television cameras, so they would have a live studio audience, but they would be using film cameras to capture everything, and then the film was used to produce the episode for broadcast to all markets, which drastically improved the quality and the

production cost for the show. So it because it was so expensive, it wasn't done for everything it was. I Love Lucy was kind of an exception because it was high enough in demand for to justify by the expense. But in something else was also happening. A guy named Charles Ginsburg was hard at work trying to come up with an alternative solution to this problem. Ginsburg had just

started working for a company called Ampex. That's the same company that was instrumental in developing multitrack recorders for recording studios. That I mentioned in the previous episode. So Ginsburg was working to make a practical video tape recorder or vt R. And if you listen to my last episode about cassettes, you heard me talking about magnetic tape and how it works. So I'm not going to repeat all of that here.

If you have not heard that previous episode, I recommend you go check it out first, as the process for recording audio to magnetic tape is pretty similar to recording video to tape. Now, obviously video carries with it a lot more information than just audio, but the process is pretty similar. But here's here's a real super fast cliffs

Notes version of this. An electrical impulse passes through an electro magnet, which then generates a fluctuating magnetic field, and that magnetic field then magnetizes some sort of medium, and in the case of videotape, we're talking about a tape coded with ferro magnetic particles. The ferro magnetic particles retain their magnetic properties after they pass under the electro magnet, so they maintain their magnetic orientation. You can think of it like that. And then if you run the tape

through a player, the reed head reverses this process. It induces an electric current to flow through the player, which can then be used to regenerate the recorded video and audio. Now Ginsburg hailed from San Francisco and he had studied engineering in college and he had been working in the radio industry since nineteen forty eight. He was mainly focused on studio and transmitter engineering, but he got the call from Ampex in nineteen fifty one to join their team

to work on this problem. In fact, the founder of Ampex himself, Alexander M. Poniata, gave gave Ginsburg a call to bring him over, and Poniatov hope Ginsburg would be able to help the company come up with the means to record broadcast quality television to videotape, and there have been some experiments with this, but the results had not been really marketable. Promising but not marketable. So Ginsburg led

a team to design a system. Ampex patented his design in nine two, and that same year Ray Dolby, whose name should sound familiar if you're into sound, if you've heard about Dolby Sound, he joined the project. He was nineteen years old at the time, and his time with the project would get interrupted as he would be called into military service for a few years uh and then

he would rejoin the project anyway. This again is not to say that these are the first people to ever work on this problem or even produce technology that could do some form of video to tape. Shortly after World War Two, engineers had been trying to find ways to preserve television on magnetic tape. But the previous efforts used audio tape recorders, and in order to store the same amount of information of video as you would with audio,

you had to run the recorders much faster. You had to dedicate a lot more tape to hold all that extra information since you had video on top of audio, which meant that you had to run these things at incredible speeds to achieve a high frequency response suitable for preserving television. And by incredible speeds, I mean the tape would pass under the recording tape head at a speed of around two hundred forty or about six meters per second. At that speed, even a short program would need an

enormous amount of tape. And that was just one typical approach. Being Crosby, he wanted to be able to tape essentially a month's worth of shows in a single week. That way he would work for a week and then have the next three weeks off. Sounds like d ill, I wish I could do that. I just I don't think I can physically record that many episodes in a week and then take another month off. But he worked with Ampex to use audio tape recorders, and with his approach

Crosby's approach, they were actually running even faster. They were running out of speed of three hundred sixty inches per second. That's nine meters per second of film or rather tape, not film, but man super fast. So Ginsberg's team comes up with a solution, but it wasn't easy. According to Ginsburg himself, the project took four years of research and testing to come up with a viable way to get around this problem, and along the way the project was

shelved twice. Rather than have the tape pass at this incredible rate of speed over the recording head or under the recording head, the idea was build a rotating recording head. The head would spin as tape passed underneath, and it would record tracks of information in arcs and such as a stom is called an arcuate recorder and That's a word I had never encountered before I did the research

for this episode. In fact, the first time I saw it printed, I thought perhaps I was looking at a typo and what they meant to say was an accurate recorder. But no, that meant they meant arquate, and that the information was being recorded in arcs onto the tape um.

The recording head that Ginsburg's team built was actually the initial one was actually three heads on a rotating drum, and it would scan tape that was about two inches in width or about five centimeters, and the tape would move past the head at a relatively leisurely thirty inches per second or seventy six point two centimeters per second, which is still pretty fast, but nothing like the two

per second of the earlier method. What's more, the rotating drums speed allowed Ginsburg to record the same amount of information as he could if the tape were moving at a blistering two thousand, five hundred inches per second. He could cramp far more information onto a shorter length of tape using this methodology. Still, this early prototype produced recordings that, in Ginsberg's own words, produced and quote almost unrecognizable picture

end quote. The next prototype added another recording head, so brought the total up to four on the drum, and with some other technical changes that get a little too complicated for me to go into in this episode. But this version had its own problems and at this stage the project was shelved. Technically, it was shelved for a second time, and this happened around the summer of nineteen fifty three, and the project would not officially start up

again in earnest until August nine. However, in that off time, Ginsburg and others on his team would continue kind of working on specific problems on the SLY and so they were able to solve some of the issues. While the project was officially no longer on the books, Ginsburg was able to secure approval from management for a small number of hours to be devoted to another prototype, and so he and his team built a device that got the

name the Mark one. On September one, nineteen fifty four, Ginsburg's team demonstrated the Mark one to executives and it must have gone pretty well because Ampex authorized the project to get back into full swing officially, and the major change was how the information was being laid down on the tape While the earlier prototypes were using that arquit approach, in which each line of information moved in an arc across the length of the tape, the new one laid

down the information in straight lines on the tape. Two more years of refinements would follow until February ninety six. That's when Ginsburg's team would give a new demo to thirty Ampex executives, and in that demo, the team used a new system, this one called the Mark four, to record a video sequence live at the event. So they shot video for a couple of minutes. Um they actually set up a camera and shot video of the people

attending the meeting. Then they rewound the tape and they fed it through the playback system, and according to Ginsburg, at the conclusion of the playback, the whole room erupted with a celebration, so it must have gone pretty darn well. They followed that up with a demonstration of the Mark four at the National Association of Broadcasters conference, and it was a huge hit, and Ampex started to get orders for its technology, which would change TV production and preservation

and lay the groundwork for home theaters. When we come back, i'll talk more about that evolution and how the video tape recorder made its transition to the video cassette recorder. But first, let's take a quick break. So the video tape recorder or VTR got real start in n S. CBS would jump on board first, but other other networks would join suit, and for about two decades that's where videotape lived. In the production side, it was very rare

to run into a consumer video tape machine. The systems cost thousands of dollars when they first came out, like fifty thou dollars uh, and that was well beyond the reach of consumers. And the tape was also really expensive and it was it was like three dollars a foot, so it was prohibitively expensive for almost everyone. This was not a consumer device, but a professional production machine. You wouldn't have one in your own home unless you were

extravagantly wealthy and probably a little bit eccentric. So Ampex would continue to improve its technology, but other companies also got into the mix with their own video tape recorders, and the quest for a consumer device would take a little longer. You had different companies UH experimenting with different widths of videotape, different styles of recording heads. Uh, So you had a lot of different companies all trying to

become the industry leader and to top Ampex. Meanwhile, you had a company out of the UK called the Nottingham Electric Valve Company that marketed a device called the tail Cam in the early nineteen sixties, and this was technically the first, or at least one of the first home video recording devices on record. This one was pretty limited. It could only record about twenty minutes of video per tape,

and it was real to real tape. It was not a cassette, so you actually had to mount reels on this device like the old real to real audio recorders. The quality of the recording wasn't terribly good. The device itself was a bit of a chore to use, and on top of it all, it was expensive. So Tellcan didn't really seem much success and it would fade away, it wouldn't get market support. According to the website Inventricity, only two tell Can units are known to exist today.

One of them is in Nottingham and the other one is in San Francisco. Ampex introduced a real to real recorder in nineteen sixty three in the United States called the Signature five, which used two inch tape, so it's about five centimeters wide. The following year, Phillips would introduce a different reel to reel video recorder meant for semi professional use or what we might refer to as the pro sumer market. It could only record in black and white, and the tape of the reels measured one inch or

about two point five centimeters in width. And then Sony introduced the CV twenty twenty, which was another reel to reel video recorder that used half inch tape. And all of these were expensive units and the real to real nature meant they weren't very user friendly. You know, you still had to feed the tape through the machine and then uh, get it attached to the secondary reel and then feed it, you know, play it from there. That was not easy to do. So like the earlier tel Can,

they didn't get a widespread adoption among consumers. If you were technically savvy and you had a whole bunch of cash, then maybe you had one, but otherwise it probably passed you by. The real to real format had a lot of drawbacks because the tape, just like film could be easily damaged by environmental forces. There was nothing protecting the tape from stuff like dust or fingers or dogs, and so you could very easily damage the tape and ruin

your recording. Companies were working on prototypes of a form factor that would greatly simplify the use of a tape, and one of those was Sony, which had started working on video cassettes back in nineteen sixty nine and its research and development department. In nine seventy, Sony, Panasonic, and JVC arrived at an agreed upon standard for video cassettes, ensuring that the different companies would create recording and playback devices as well as cassettes that could work together across

the different companies products. So if you bought a any video cassette player, then you bought a cassette that was made by j VC, you could be sure that the two would work together. In Sony introduced the U Matic, which is arguably the first video cassette recorder or VCR, but the name VCR actually comes from a different device, the Phillips Video Cassette Recorder. That one came out a

couple of months after Sony's. It didn't seem much consumer success, but lower budget television stations relied on it to record broadcasts to video and in fact in TV production. The you Matic would stick around until the nineteen nineties, so while it didn't become a vague home device, it did play a very important role in TV production behind the scenes. A company called c t I introduced another cassette player

called the cartra Vision in nineteen seventy two. It became the first company to offer pre recorded films for purchase for the home. So this was the first time you had a company not just produce a player, but also make deals with production studios to get licensing for films or television programs and then to offer them for sale. So now people had the option to actually own a copy of a film, making it possible to watch whenever

they wanted. It was a huge, huge deal, right. This was a breakthrough in approach, but the cart Revision as a format didn't last very long. It didn't take off, so while the concept was important, the actual implementation didn't work. All of those early devices were really expensive and that contributed to their lack of tractions. So while we started to see the promise of this technology, it wasn't quite at the level where it could be commercially viable for

the home consumer. That changed in UH. Sony and j VC had a little parting of the ways. Had worked together to create the standard for you Matic, but now Sony was looking to develop its own proprietary approach for the home market UH, and so they were both trying different proprietary approaches at the same time. Sony's version was the Beta Max format, which was smaller than the u

Matic format. If you had a Pumatic cassette and a Beta Max cassette side by side, you'd see the Beta Max cassette was smaller, and it was able to produce recordings of a comparable quality to you Matic. It wasn't quite as good, but it was pretty good. It's really close. Then j v C would follow suit in nineteen seventy six with the introduction of the VHS format, and thus began one of the famous format wars that we talked

about in Tech Beta Max versus VHS. It's a story that we've seen play out lots of different times, and it's a story we're going to revisit in a future episode with Blu Ray versus HD DVD Beta mat X had the edge over VHS when it came to picture quality, the quality was slightly better. The difference wasn't a dramatic one, but Beta Max could legitimately claim our picture has higher resolution than VHS. However, VHS tapes could hold more content

than Beta Max tapes could. Early Beta Max tapes had a limit of about an hour's worth of material, so you couldn't even get a full movie on a single Beta Max cassette. In the early days, VHS could outperform in that space. With a VHS tape, even an early one, you could record a whole film onto one cassette. Later on you would be able to film to record multiple

films on a single cassette. The HS slowly got the upper hand in the format wars, and by night one, the VHS format accounted for seventy five of the VCR market. The Beta Max share would drop continuously at you know it was that twenty in nine. By night six it was down to just seven point five percent of the market. So VHS dominated in the space. But while VHS and Beta Max were fighting for supremacy, there was another fight that was boiling regarding the practice of videotaping at home

at all. This one originated in Hollywood. So in nineteen seventy six, the same year that JVC would debut the VHS format, the movie studio Universal Pictures filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Sony. The argument Universal made was that just by creating a device capable of recording video images off of a television, Sony had violated copyright law. Akio Marita, Sony's founder, had said that the Beta max device allowed for a time shift approach to television. That's something we'll

talk about again. Upon the development of the digital video recorder, so the idea was no longer would you have audiences being dependent upon the broadcast schedule of TV stations. I don't know if all of you guys remember this. Some of you young ones may not have ever known a world like this, but back in the day, we were

completely dependent upon the broadcast schedule of television stations. If you were not home at eight pm on a Thursday night, you were not going to see that next episode of I don't know, cheers um, unless you had to have happened to have a VCR where you could set it to record while you were away and then you could time shift. You could watch the program whenever you wanted on your schedule. So it was kind of like an on demand kind of approach, except you had to actually

actively record the show first. But before there were VCRs that there was no option. You were either home to watch it or you missed it and that was it. So Marita's argument was, this is going to give the consumer far more flexibility in the consumption of entertainment. So you could leave your home, you set your recorder to capture a program or a film on television, and then you can watch it whenever you wanted. It's something we take for granted now, but this was a brand new

idea in the nineties seventies. It was revolutionary. But Lou Wasserman of m c A slash Universal had different plans. See, he had an idea that his company was going to partner with some other companies on developing a proprietary playback device. Uh primarily they were going to partner with Phillips and this device was called disco Vision and would later be

called the Laser Disc. And the plan was to release content for this device and it would only be able to play that content back it couldn't record anything, It could only play back prerecorded material, and that would give Universal full control of its television and film libraries. They could say, hey, do you want to see our movies, Well you can do that, but the only way you can do it is to go through us, to buy these proprietary discs that will run on this proprietary hardware

and UH. That way they could have full control of the situation. Walt Disney Productions would join with Universal in this lawsuit against uh UH, the Sony, and and they sought to block all sales of Beta Max machines. Now, Sony argued that the Beta Max was similar to tape recorders, which had been deemed a legal product all the way back in the nineteen sixties. So the U. S. District Court would hear the case in nineteen seventy nine, and

they ruled in favor of Sony. But then the case went to an appeals court and the appeals court reversed the decision in nineteen one. However, at this point, the VCR was really doing pretty well. VCR sales were picking up, and the VHS format, which wasn't even Beta Max, was already ahead of the Sony beta max approach. So even if the the court had argued that there needs to

be a block on beta max sales, VHS was already winning. However, the case would continue through the court system, finally making its way all the way to the United States Supreme Court in four and the Supreme Court reversed the appeals court decision and ruled in favor for Sony that settled the matter officially saying these devices do not violate copyright law. By half of all American households would own a VCR.

As for the movie studios well, Even as the case was making its way through the court, it became clear that video cassettes actually represented a new line of revenue generation that it wasn't going to hurt the studios. It could actually really help them. Studios could dive into their back catalogs of movies and sell video cassettes to consumers movies that would otherwise just sit in a storage facility, maybe like an old salt mine. They could actually earn money. Again.

Even Walt Disney Productions would jump on board, though that was largely due to a change in leadership because a guy named Michael Eisner became CEO of the company, and Eisner led the studio to release several of their classic films on video cassette, and before long, Disney Movies captured something like seven out of the top ten best selling video tapes of all time, so it was a very much a winning strategy for Walt Disney, even though earlier

the company had opposed the technology. That same year was when the videotape industry actually overtook the film industry in revenue, and it turned out the fears of piracy were largely misplaced. Just like audio cassettes, most VCRs can only record at the same speed as the playback of a source, so if you're trying to tape a two hour movie, it would take you two hours to tape it. It wasn't the sort of thing that the average person could do

to just churn out pirated copies of videos. Though if you got your hands on some semi professional equipment, you could do it at a faster clip. You could reproduce video tapes faster than your your you know, store brand VCR, but that was an investment most folks weren't able to make. So it was possible to generate, you know, lots of of unlicensed copies of a film, but only if you had access to this equipment. If you were just using two VCRs at home, it was such a painstakingly long

process that it didn't make much sense now. In the early days, prerecorded video cassettes were really expensive, like if you wanted to go out and buy a movie on video cassette, you were showing out some big bucks. For example, when Columbia Pictures made Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters available for purchase on VHS,

each copy costs the princely sum of eighty dollars. The company sold more than four hundred thousand copies of the film at that price, And if you want to adjust it for inflation in today's cash, that's nearly a hundred ninety dollars for a copy of a movie. And that's just for one film. Yikes, switching gears for a second. The birth of the video cassette also led to the

birth of another industry that a video rental. It's pretty much agreed that the first, honest to goodness real video rental store was created by George Atkinson in nineteen seventy seven in Los Angeles, California. A guy named Andre Blair had negotiated with studios to license the rights for a few dozen films to be recorded to videotape for sale, and Atkinson bought up some copies of those films that that Blay had licensed, and then he started to offer

those up as rentals. Atkinson actually faced some opposition for this business, with entertainment companies threatening to sue him, but he researched copyright law and he saw that he had the right, as the owner of a copy of a work to rent or resell his copy. He wasn't doing anything illegal, he wasn't duplicating the films, He was just

renting the copy he happened to own. Other video rental stores opened in different parts of the country, and by night one the owners of several of these stores or small chains of stores got together to form an industry organization they called the Video Software Dealers Association, and the purpose of that organization was to help TechEd video rental stores from litigation and changes to what is called the first sale doctrine, as the concept that says a copyright

holder can't stop someone from lending out or reselling their legally acquired copy of a copyrighted work without those protections. Stuff like libraries would cease to exist because of legal challenges. But because this doctrine is in place, I can do stuff like by a VHS copy of Tron, and later on I can sell it at a garage sale without worrying about getting sued for it or whether if I

am sued for it, I'll win. Now, one thing that I couldn't do is I wouldn't be allowed to make copies of that Tron tape and then sell those copies to other people. The right to reproduce a copyrighted work falls to the owner of the copyright. The most I could do is I can make a backup copy of the Tron tape that I own myself, and I'm not selling it. I'm not lending it out. I make a backup copy and I put it away in a safe place, just in case my original tape breaks or something else

goes wrong. Backup copies fall under the category of fair use and copyright law, meaning it's a fair use of the copyrighted work. So there's some fine lines to walk in this arena. And developments and technology are what made these these ideas necessary, And the same thing holds true for record albums and other stuff. Like if I owned a vinyl album, I would be allowed to transfer that to audio cassette in order for me to have a backup copy of that vinyl album should something happen to it.

But I couldn't make copies of it over and over and over again and then give it away or sell it to friends. That would be a violation of copyright. This is also going to become important when we move to digital music, and we'll see that in future episodes. So, the video cassette was changing the business of entertainment and it allowed for the establishment of video rental companies. The men that filmmakers and entertainers had a new market they

could exploit. This is also when enterprising individuals started making content specifically for the home video market. Some we're making stuff like self help videos or exercise videos, or made for video films and shows. Stuff that couldn't get distribution in theaters or on television could find a home on video cassette. And boy, if you've ever gone through the bargain bins that have had video cassettes in them, you've probably seen some examples of this stuff that you otherwise

never would have heard of. And the late nineteen eighties, studios began to drop the price of prerecorded video cassettes, with tapes dropping below thirty dollars a title, and the video cassette era boomed, with VCRs becoming a common component in homes around the world. It would also set the stage for future technologies like the DVD player and later still the HD DVD player and the Blu ray player.

Those technologies rely on a completely different approach to recording media, but the business side of selling and renting copies and the consumer relationship with the technology would be similar to that of the VCR and the video cassette. It also helped establish practices and precedents that would be important upon

the introduction of devices like digital video recorders. So for now, let's shift not in time but in top So when we come back, I'll talk a bit about a different technology that would displace the audio cassette in the consumer music world, the compact disc. But first let's take another

quick break. While the audio cassette, sometimes called the compact cassette, was gearing up to take over the top spot in consumer audio from the vinyl record album, its successor was already in development, the compact disc, which would be able to preserve music and a high fidelity much higher than what audio cassettes could do at the time, and with proper care, could last much longer than audio cassettes was

starting to take shape. Interestingly, the compact disc kind of rose out of a failure, namely that the aforementioned laser disc. So while magnetic tape stored information using magnetism, laser discs and later CDs and DVDs and blu rays and h D DVDs used optical storage uh optical storage, meaning that it was all done with light. So a physicist named James Russell pioneered this technology all the way back in the nineteen sixties. He's a brilliant physicist and also a

lover of music. That led him kind of down this pathway to determine how could he create a new form of storage media. He was wanting to make something that would preserve music better than the vinyl form factor. See, he was frustrated because the vinyl album methodology means you're going to be wearing out your records if you listen to them a lot, because you're using a physical stylus or needle. It's making its way through the grooves on the record, and as it does so, it starts to

wear down those grooves a little bit. So if you listen to the same vinyl album enough times, you're going to negatively affect the quality of the sound you get when you play it back. It just starts to wear down. So he said, we need some way to play back music that doesn't require physical contact between the media and the playback device. There needs to be some way where whatever the sensor is that's picking up the information isn't

directly touching the actual surface that holds that information. He determined that if you converted music into binary data. In other words, if you encoded the music in zeros and ones the information of computers in bits, and you did that to describe everything about the music, you know, all the frequencies, all the volumes, you could store this music digitally onto a medium. By the way, this is essentially the idea that Ada Lovelace had way back in the

eighteen hundreds when she was working with Charles Babbage. She had suggested that mathematics could be used to represent all sorts of things, including music, and that's essentially what Russell was saying as well. He was specifically talking about binary whereas uh Lovelace did not quite get to that point, but Russell was saying, no, we could. We could totally describe music in bits and be able to encode it in that way, and then using the proper decoding, you

could decipher the information and replicate the performance. So if you use light to pick up this digital information, you wouldn't need physical contact with the recorded surface of a piece of media. So he filed for a patent in nineteen sixty six for what he called the Digital to Optical Recording and Playback System, and he received the patent in nineteen seventy. Russell used a photo sensitive platter and he programmed it by making alternating dark and light bits

measuring about a micron in size. So to play back what was recorded on the platter, he used a laser to scan it, and the laser was register during the tiny pits on the platter. Those pits represented the binary patterns on the platter. So these pits were telling the system whether it was a zero or one. And you had some very nice mirrors to reflect any light that was being picked up, and that was what was indicating whether or not it was a pit. Or just a

regular plateau on the platter. This became sort of the basis for the laser disc. Universal and Phillips would license the pattern from Russell, but they departed from Russell's plan. See, Russell wanted to record in pure digital. He wanted to convert everything into binary information. Everything was supposed to be bits.

The laser disc went a slightly different way. So the laser disc would record information on a platter on a disc in the form of little pits, just like Russell's vision, but the encoding was analog, not digital, so instead of it being a representation of zeros and ones, the shape and the length of the pits indicated the analog information

that was encoded onto the disc. So you could argue the laser disc is mostly an analog format, which it gets really confusing because you're using an optical approach, but it is technically, at least in some definitions, and analog medium. Now, to get into the real reasons why this is so would require a much more in depth look at the laser disc, and honestly, I don't have the time to do that in this episode, so I'll save that for

a future episode. I'll do a full episode just about the development of the laser disc in a future episode of tech Stuff, But it was a fundamentally different approach to what Russell was working on this. The pits on the laser disc look kind of like the ones you would see on a c D or a DVD or a Blu ray if you had a microscope to really look at them, but they didn't represent digital bits of information in the same way. All right, So back to Russell. I want to take a second here to point out

that russ really was a genius still is. It's not just that he came up with a new method of storing data onto a medium. He was also able to figure out how to encode audio in binary data so that it could be decoded and played back, and it took years of hard work and research to pull it all off. Digital recording is different from analog, and I've done episodes about this as well, so I'm not going to go into great detail, but I do want to

kind of address this for a little bit. With analog, you've got a continuous input signal, right, It's like if you were to look at a wave, it's just a steady wave that is unbroken. Binary is a little bit different. With binary, you sample an incoming signal. UH sampling is kind of like taking snapshots of a signal, and the more samples you take per given unit of time, the greater the resolution of your recording. I'm going to give you a quick analogy this. This is just a sort

of visualize while I'm talking about. So let's say you're standing outside of a room and the door to that room is currently closed. It's a very heavy door. You can open the door, but shortly after you open it, you have to let go and it'll slam shut. So when you open the door, you can hear what's going on inside the room, but when the door is closed, you can't make out what's going on. And because the door will slam shut shortly after you open it, you

only get a moment to hear something. So you open the door quickly and you hear a lot of people being loud, but you only hear it for that instant before the door shuts and you can't hear anything else. And at that moment, you can't really draw any conclusions about what you just heard. You just heard people being loud. You don't know if they're happy or they're angry, or they're scared, or they're just trying to talk over each other.

So you open the door again. And the more times you're able to open the door, the better an idea you have of what's going on inside that room. And if you're able to open up the door very quickly, like right after it closes, it could be almost like you're hearing what's going on in the room uninterrupted. Of course, from an outside observer, you would look like you were quite eccentric as you kept on opening a door that

kept shutting on you. Digital sampling is a little bit like that, though it gets much more technical as you might imagine. But the digital nature of processing the sound opened up a new battleground between audio files and people just wanted easy access to music. I'll touch on that

a bit more in the next episode. The LaserDisc gathered a devoted audience of film lovers, but the expense of the devices and the limited video library meant and didn't get widespread adoption the man, You know, LaserDiscs were pretty darn neat. You typically had to flip them over to watch a whole movie. One side might hold thirty or sixty minutes worth of materials, so they had a limited capacity.

But they also introduced other stuff that would become standard in future formats, stuff like extra features which you wouldn't get in a typical VHS tape. You know, you buy a VHS tape of a movie, you get the movie. You buy a laser disc of the movie, you might get some commentary, you might get extra scenes, you might get a lot of stuff, and you could jump around and watch different scenes through essentially the random access approach. But you couldn't do that with VHS. You had to

just watch at whatever point the tape was at. You could fast forward or rewind, but you couldn't just jump to a chapter or something. You could do that with laser discs. So this was stuff that would carry over into the DVD and Blu ray eras and it opened up new opportunities and entertainment. So again we see how the evolution of technology would change the actual business of entertainment.

Phillips initially was ready to say sayannara to the optical storage format after the laser disc failed to win out over the cassette based video formats that were already on the market, but eventually the company, along with Sony came around to the idea for audio discs, and the compact disc was born. Phillips unveiled a prototype of the compact disc in teen seventy nine, but it would be a

few years before the format was standardized. For one thing, Sony allegedly demanded that a single compact disc would need to be able to hold an entire performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. So, if you've ever wondered why a standard c D is four point seven inches or twelve centimeters in diameter, allegedly it's because of Beethoven. The duration of Beethoven's symphony depends upon the arrangement, but typically the Ninth

Symphony tends to last somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy minutes. However, they were looking for the longest version of the symphony recorded to make that the standard, and it clocked in at around seventy four minutes. And to hold that much audio, the CD would have to be twelve centimeters in diameter,

and there we have it. Phillips and Sony established the standards for CDs in nineteen eighty, with Phillips showing off the first production model meant for consumers two years later, and according to the BBC, the first two commercial c D presses ever were a recording of Strauss's Alpine Symphony and the immortal album The Visitors by Abba Super. When the CD got started in the early nineteen eighties, it wouldn't really start to be a threat to the cassette

until the nineteen nineties. So in our next episode will continue our look at the c D and its impact on the entertainment industry, including more about the audio file objection I mentioned earlier. Will also look into the birth of DVDs and their successors and lay the ground for the digital file era. I hope you guys are enjoying

this series. I really like looking at this sort of big picture stuff, this evolution of technology and how that changed not just the business, but are very thoughts around entertainment, how our attitudes about entertainment have changed as the technology has enabled different ways to consume that that entertainment um to me. This is what I love most about tech stuff, is this relationship between technology industry and our our society. So I hope you guys are enjoying this, and if

you're not, don't worry. Pretty soon we're gonna be off this topic and talking about all sorts of other stuff. If you have your own suggestions of what I should be covering next, why not send me an email the addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com or pop on over to tech stuff podcast dot com. That's our website where you'll find the archive of all of our older episodes, plus you'll find links to our social

media presence. You can reach out to me on Facebook or on Twitter and I'll be happy to hear your suggestions there as well. And also don't forget to head on over to our store and if you purchase something over there, it goes to help the show and we greatly appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Hex Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you

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