[An electronic / choral rendition of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition]
So.
It’s the mid 1960’s, everyone’s got a television, but nobody’s got a way to
choose what they wanna watch.
You’ve got your network affiliates, a few of those newfangled UHF stations...
I hear 62's pretty good.
But that's it.
How boring.
How limiting.
How archaic.
Now we’ve got video tape recorders, but those things use crazy technology that’s
super expensive.
We’ll probably never get video tape technology to the point that we could market it for the home.
And besides, without some sort of... small case which holds the tape in a convenient and easy-to-handle
form factor, it’s not likely to go over well with the layperson.
Clearly tape isn’t a good option.
I know!
Discs!
Yes, it can be hard to believe for those who remember transitioning from VHS to DVD, but
if things went according to plan, us home users would have had video discs long before
we had video tape.
RCA had begun research into a home videodisc system in 1964, and a mere 17 years later,
they came out with this.
The Capacitance Electronic Disc system, or CED, which they branded and marketed as the
SelectaVision Videodisc System.
This product was RCA’s ultimate folly.
It arguably destroyed the company.
After years of relentless research, they released a product so incredibly limited and so hilariously
flawed that it’s a miracle they even bothered trying.
Yet, they did.
And they shouldn’t have.
Now, there are still some fans of this ill-fated videodisc system, and I’m sorry if I upset
you when I say this, but it must be said.
RCA was out of their minds here.
In hindsight, this product was so incredibly weird and dumb and doomed.
But… the idea behind it is actually pretty remarkable.
Had it been released, say in 1975, it might have achieved immense success.
Our entire media landscape might be completely different had RCA succeeded in getting this
product to market just half a decade earlier.
That’s because their ultimate goal was to use the technology of the humble record player
and turn it into a cheap, and easily mass-produced, video format.
Hiding inside this caddy is a black PVC disc, not that different from the standard phonograph
records of the day.
This disc is read with a stylus, just like a normal phonograph record, however it’s
not vibration that it’s detecting.
I’ll get to that a little later but this is evidence that RCA did actually meet the
goal they set out for themselves.
It was just accomplished way too late, and with way too many compromises.
As usual, to understand this story, we need to start in the past
before the past this comes from.
In the early days of radio and television, RCA, that’s the Radio Corporation of America,
was among the most innovative companies.
Their history dates back to 1899, when the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America
was formed as a subsidiary of the British Marconi Company.
In these early days of radio, the technologies which made radio possible
were constantly evolving.
Through World War I, radio was used almost exclusively for wireless telegraphy, that’s
the classic dots and dashes that make up the world famous,
say it with me now,
character encoding schemes of which Morse code is one.
Simple radio transmitters, called spark-gap transmitters, were able to send radio pulses
quite easily, however audio wasn’t super possible yet.
Transmission of audio was relatively rare and mainly experimental.
It wouldn’t really become, what you might call, “a thing” until after the war.
Speaking of after the war, well, actually before the war, in 1904,
what rhymes galore!
General Electric had been tasked with creating a high frequency alternator, which was then
designed by Ernst Alexanderson, and thus the world of radio was introduced to another transmission
technology, the Alexanderson Alternator.
Compared with the earlier spark-gap transmitters, it allowed for transmitting on very narrow
frequency bands (reducing noise), and had a lot of other neat advantages, too, but also
some disadvantages, notably... they were huge.
But, anyway...
In 1919, now we’re after the war again, General Electric had installed one of these
amazing Alexanderson Alternators for the US Navy at the Marconi transmitter site in
New Brunswick, New Jersey.
The Marconi people were super impressed with the thing, and they were all like
“We’d like to buy your alternator production division, General Electric”
to which GE responded,
“Well golly gee ain’t that dandy, we’ve been looking to sell off our alternator production
unit and you sound like the perfect entity to make that purchase”
to which the US Navy said
“Uh-oh”.
See, the Navy was getting all worried that if American Marconi was able to buy the alternator
production from GE, they
(and thus their British parent company)
would have world domination in wireless communications.
The Navy said, "we can’t have that!"
So, the Navy convinced GE to, rather than sell their alternator production to American Marconi
to just go ahead and buy American Marconi and nip that little world domination problem
in the bud.
And so they did, turning American Marconi into a subsidiary of General Electric, which
would henceforth be called the Radio Corporation of America.
So.
That’s how RCA became a thing.
RCA grew and grew and grew, breaking into the consumer radio space, and eventually the
whole "RCA is owned by GE and they’re getting kinda monopolistic" thing meant that RCA was
forced by the US Justice Department to break off into its own company in 1932.
But still.
They were huge, and they knew how to make cool sh**.
RCA had touched nearly every major technological advancement of the early twentieth century.
They had purchased the Victor company, which not only granted them use of Nipper and the
classic “His Master’s Voice” tagline, but also Victor’s record label and phonograph
production.
RCA had developed Photophone, a sound-on-film system for motion pictures.
They were instrumental in the proliferation of television, and pretty much invented color television.
In fact, they weren’t just RCA.
They were
ANNOUNCER: R C A
The most trusted name in television!
So.
This was a massive and well-respected company, with nearly limitless resources,
talented engineers, and with a long track record of successful innovation.
And yet, somehow...
This happened.
The RCA Videodisc is simultaneously a technical marvel and a technical monstrosity.
Getting a phonograph record to produce video signals that a TV could display was a rather
lofty goal.
Allow me to explain why.
This phonograph record contains a very long spiral groove with walls that move up and
down and all around, and when you put it on a turntable, then put a stylus inside the
groove, and give the record a good spin, those wibbly wobbly grooves will make the stylus
go all wibbly wobbly, too. And thanks to the phonograph's cartridge,
those wibbly wobbly wibble wobbles
turn into electrical signals.
We can then make those signals stronger through amplification, pump them through loudspeakers,
and listen to the music contained on the disc.
But, well this disc doesn’t need to produce very high frequency signals.
The range of human hearing tops out at around 20 kilohertz, so we don’t need to make this
record too precisely.
If we want to make a disc capable of higher frequencies, we need to do one of two things;
either make the groove walls contain really tightly spaced wobbles,
or speed up the rotation of the disc.
Ideally, we’d do both.
OK, so how much more bandwidth do we need?
If normal disc can go up to 20 kilohertz,
uh, what’s a TV signal?
Oh, just about 5 megahertz.
Alright, so we need to fit 250 times as much information onto one of these discs.
that sounds… difficult.
And it was.
Remember, research started in 1964, but the product didn’t get released until 1981.
When it finally did make it to market, up to 60 minutes of video (later pushed to 63)
were held on each side of the disc, and although bandwidth was reduced to 3 megahertz to make
things a little easier, this still meant that about 450 times as much information was held
on a 60 minute CED than on a 20 minute vinyl record.
Now, you might be wondering, why on Earth was RCA so determined to make video work on vinyl?
Simple.
Ease of manufacture.
Vinyl records are stamped from metal masters, and can be pumped out quickly and cheaply.
If RCA could figure out how to use the dead simple, and decades-perfected technology of
the phonograph to produce a videodisc, they would have had a miraculous product on their hands.
RCA envisioned a relatively cheap device, not that far off from a normal record player, that
you’d simply put your new video discs in, and be delighted as your living room became
a place to watch television on your own terms.
The discs themselves wouldn’t be very expensive to make, as they’d just be a more perfected
vinyl record.
So movie and television studios should be happy to jump on board, as discs could be sold for
little more than the cost of a record album, while still making significant profit.
The premise seems less bonkers when you remember that in 1964, videotape was well over a decade
away from entering the home market in meaningful volumes.
Delicate mechanisms, expensive electronics, and open-reels of wide, heavy tape made it
seem very unlikely that videotape would end up in the home any time soon.
And even if that somehow happened, the tapes themselves would be very expensive, not only
because the tape is expensive to manufacture, but because mass-producing pre-recorded tapes
would require dozens or even hundreds of tape recorders to make duplicate recordings in
real-time.
So it wouldn’t be a great way to sell pre-recorded content.
Nobody would buy such an expensive tape, and no movie studio will settle for the razor-thin margins.
And so, in the frame of 1964, the RCA Videodisc actually seems like a great idea.
Use the same equipment and technology that’s used to mass-produce records for the music
industry, and replicate that model for things like movies, television shows, and perhaps
one day, whole new categories of content.
Except, the development process dragged on for far too long.
By 1972, they had only managed to fit 10 minutes of video on one side of a disc.
What’s more, they discovered that simple vinyl discs wouldn’t work.
The technology they had developed required that the discs be conductive. The first
prototype discs were metallized, with a styrene top coat, and a lubricant coating on top of that.
Now RCA wasn’t dumb, and they realized 10 minutes was dumb.
So, they kept on trucking, continuing to pour resources into the project.
One of the things they soon discovered was that the discs were extremely fragile.
If you’re trying to pack a few dozen grooves into the space of what used to be just one,
the discs could easily be destroyed from normal handling.
Up until this point, RCA imagined the discs would be naked, just like normal phonograph records.
Finally realizing that, well, this is silly, RCA designed these not-at-all clunky caddies to
hold the discs nice and safely.
We wouldn’t want humans touching them.
Still, the system needed a lot more work.
The prototype discs, being multi-layered and metallized, didn’t exactly follow the
“make movies as quickly and cheaply as vinyl” premise they had been getting at.
They did eventually discover that using PVC impregnated with conductive carbon particles
would work well enough, and so they did get back to that goal eventually, but it took a while.
As we know.
By the time 1981 rolled around, RCA had “perfected” the system.
60 minutes per side, safe protective caddies, a totally sleek-looking player, and a catalog
of movies ready to go at launch.
The players were pretty cheap to make, so RCA was able to sell them for about $500
(that’s roughly equivalent to $1,500 today).
That sounds steep, but videocassette recorders cost about double that when the CED was launched.
Wait.
You mean, videotape made it into the home before the CED was launched?
Yes.
It did!
And you know who had a big part in making that happen?
Why, a little company called RCA.
Remember how I said RCA wasn’t dumb?
Well, they saw the rise of the videocassette recorder happening, and quickly jumped in.
They didn’t manufacture any VCRs themselves, instead choosing to outsource that task to
companies like Matushita and Hitachi, but RCA’s presence in the VCR market was a huge deal.
RCA backed the VHS format created by JVC, rather than going with the slightly older
Betamax format from Sony.
And, it was RCA who pushed the development of the long-play recording mode, enabling
VHS machines to record 4 hours on one tape, and finally capture an entire football game.
This was all happening in the late 1970’s, in fact RCA’s very first VCR
(which was the first to support 4 hour recording)
hit the scene in 1977.
Oh, and you know what RCA decided to call their line of VCRs?
SelectaVision.
What!?
Yeah, this was weird.
RCA decided to use the name they were planning to call their new videodisc system for their
imported line of VCRs.
Now, I suppose this wasn’t a huge deal, but it is still strange.
In fact, it looks like RCA just stole all the planned marketing material
for the CED and slapped it onto their VCRs.
ANNOUNCER: Let RCA turn your television into SelectaVision!
This seemed even weirder when you remember that in the early days of the VCR, pre-recorded
content wasn’t really a thing yet.
For the most part, VCRs were used to record live TV to be watched later,
a process known as time-shifting.
In that context, SelectaVision doesn’t even really make that much sense.
You’re not selecting something to watch.
You’re planning to record something, and will watch it later.
Remember, these devices are called VCRs, which stands for video cassette recorder,
not video cassette player.
And it's not a "VHS player"
Stop calling it that.
RCA was either really forward thinking and thought that pre-recorded tapes would eventually
become a big deal, but of course that would fly in the face of their continuing efforts
to produce the Videodisc system, or else they were just really lazy and figured, sure, we’ll
use that name we planned to use for this entirely different product we’re still working on
for some reason.
Just to muddy the waters a bit, SelectaVision was actually first coined for an earlier abandoned
project of RCA’s, the HoloTape player, however even though that was tape-based, it wasn’t
capable of recording.
This story, for such a simple product, is maddeningly complicated and bizarre.
Had the CED existed in a vacuum, it would have made sense.
But in a world where the VCR existed, a world where the VCR was actively being marketed
by RCA,
its existence is jus... it, it's…
WHY?
Why bother continuing this project?
What problem could the videodisc possibly solve when RCA’s own VCRs had been on the
market for four years?
Well… maybe, cost.
Alright.
After talking about this for close to 15 minutes, we’re finally gonna explore this player
a little more.
The genius of RCA’s machine is that, compared to a VCR, it’s incredibly simple.
Just a turntable, a pickup mechanism containing the stylus, and then the electronics needed
to decode the signals on the disc.
To play a disc, the caddy is inserted all the way into the player, which unlocks and
grabs hold of the spine, and thus when the caddy is removed, the disc is left inside.
The main control lever is mechanically linked to the turntable, and moving it from the load/unload
position into the play position lifts the turntable, which in turn lifts the disc up
towards the stylus.
It also closes a shutter to prevent you from inserting the caddy while it’s playing.
The motor driving the turntable could be a cheap, single-speed AC motor since the discs
spin at a constant speed of 450 RPM, which is tied to the frame rate of television sets,
which is itself tied to the line frequency of 60 hz.
You can easily hear the distinctive 60 hz humming of a plain ‘ol motor.
[a clunk-like sound]
[humming]
[some resonance as the motor reaches speed]
[and other various mechanical noises, with a distinct one right...
about....
here]
In PAL countries (yes, RCA did briefly market this system overseas) the turntable spun at
375 RPM, which is tied to the frame rate and line frequency of 50 hz.
Each rotation of the disc held 4 complete frames of video, or eight fields, and since
a television will automatically synchronize itself with the vertical blanking intervals
encoded on the disc, a simple AC motor would work fine.
You can see the 8 blanking intervals on a CED pretty clearly with the right light, just
like you can see them on a CAV Laserdisc.
However, a Laserdisc only holds one frame of video per rotation, so you only see two
blanking intervals.
And now let’s talk about that stylus.
The very tiny, user-replaceable diamond stylus is there only to provide physical tracking
on the disc.
The player doesn’t sense vibration in the stylus, nor does the stylus actually have
anything to do with the signal being read.
Instead, bonded to the stylus is a titanium electrode which senses changes in capacitance
brought about by the depth of the groove.
Ah, finally the answer as to why it’s called the Capacitance Electronic Disc.
And also the answer to why the disc needed to be conductive.
The disc, being a conductor, and the titanium electrode, also being a conductor,
form a capacitor.
The actual video and audio signals are created by teeny tiny little undulations on the disc,
which move the surface of the disc closer to and farther away from the electrode as
it spins, thus varying the value of the capacitor formed by the stylus and disc.
The circuitry in the player is essentially measuring the capacitance value, and as it
changes, it can convert that change into a change in signal amplitude.
And thus, we can recreate a video signal.
For those paying careful attention, you’ll have noticed that the player measures change
in a capacitor.
Now, when something is said to be in a state of ongoing change, it is sometimes said to
be in flux.
Therefore, this disc, when being read by the player, becomes part of a flux capacitor.
Now you know.
Also, Back to the Future was in fact released on CED, though if we jump ahead that far we’ll
be spoiling the end.
Fun fact!
The first shipment of DeLoreans left Belfast just two days before the CED system was officially
released on March 22nd, 1981.
The player was able to control where the stylus landed on the disc with an electromagnet,
as well as by moving the carriage that contains the stylus.
Ordinarily the carriage would just move in steps as the stylus followed the disc (and
the disc contained some basic digital signaling to tell the player where it was), but when
using the picture search function, the player could bump the stylus forwards and backwards
with the electromagnet for finer control.
This was also used to get the player out of a locked groove situation, as it could determine
it was stuck thanks to the position signals that weren't advancing,
and kick the stylus forward a couple of grooves
to get unstuck.
And getting stuck was, unfortunately, not uncommon.
♫ ♫
[ suddenly no more ♫ ]
While the caddies did a fairly good job at keeping the discs clean, they weren’t perfect.
And in fact, the caddies themselves could destroy the discs if they weren’t stored right.
See, this system wasn’t just late, it was awfully flawed.
But before we get into that, let’s finish this video up by talking a little bit about
the discs themselves.
RCA’s VideoDiscs were sold for between $15 and about $30, although the vast majority
were priced at $20 and up, and some special box sets shot way past $30.
Now that’s not… terribly expensive, even for 1981 dollars.
In 1981 vinyl LPs were starting to push into the $10 territory for high-profile releases,
so you could say SelectaVision discs cost about the same as 2 new record albums.
And, really, that’s pretty great when you consider that you’re getting a 90 minute (or so)
movie for the same cost as at best an hour of music.
When new, these discs had about the same image quality as a VHS tape, though some claimed
it was a little better.
And honestly, the quality of the image coming from these discs is perfectly fine.
The only problem is… this can happen.
[ unintelligible audio as the disc skips uncontrollably ]
How common was this when the system was new?
It’s hard to say.
The caddy design was fairly good and would keep dust from getting in there, so perhaps
these discs all worked great in 1981.
For now, let’s just assume they did.
Since the discs only held 60 minutes per side, at some point you’re gonna have to flip
that disc over.
And, that’s a somewhat strange task with this player.
You take your empty caddy, stick it all the way in, pull it back out, now flip it over,
shove it back in all the way again, and pull it out again.
That’s… a little more cumbersome than just flipping an LP over.
Or a Laserdisc.
Ahhh yeah....
What about that other videodisc format?
Well, it certainly didn’t help RCA’s mission, here.
But, it might not have mattered much at all.
Early laserdiscs typically weren’t mastered all that well, and comparing the quality between
a CED and a Laserdisc from the early ‘80s reveals, they’re actually not that far off.
However, it’s possible that had RCA decided to take one of the innovations of Laserdisc
and adapt it for the CED, it might not have failed quite as hard as it did.
Or perhaps at all.
In the next video, we’ll take a closer look at where the CED was in the marketplace, how
it managed to justify its existence in a sea of VCRs and Laserdiscs, and why given what
we know about how its short life panned out, it might have radically changed how we consumed
media throughout the 1980’s and into today, especially if it had been released in the
mid ‘70s.
Thanks for watching!
I know this story meandered around a lot, but I promise everything you learned here
will make the next video make a little more sense.
And it will also make the CED make even less sense.
As always, I’d like to thank the fine folks supporting this channel through Patreon.
Viewers like you make this channel possible, and I really appreciate your support.
If you’d like to join these people in supporting the channel with a pledge of your own, please
check out my Patreon page.
Thanks for your consideration, and I’ll see you next time.
♫ capacitavely smooth jazz ♫
Somehow…
[sounds of discs clattering together]
No…
So, that’s how RCA became a thing.
R… [clears throat] So?
So.
So?
So.
Why on Earth was RCA so determined to make video work on vinyl?
Simple.
[smirks]
Or don’t fall down, that works too...
...hundreds of tape duplicators to make duplicate recording in real t…
augh, no no no, I scr aarr arr... that was tape recorders!
Duplicators is a term
that
you’d probably get the context of, but no.
In PAL [coughs]
And It was, remember res… no.
no no no.
no no no no no.