[ soft rhythmic music ]
[ chime ]
[ chiiiiime ]
[ oh, another chime ]
[ whooshy sound ]
[ drums kick in, with some horns ]
[ good lord this is getting pretty ambitious ]
[ woah, rainbow horns ]
[ THIS IS SO CONFIDENT I LOVE IT ]
[ and now the video glitches like crazy because CED ]
Yeahh… things didn’t quite go as planned, did they?
Welcome to part 2 of our exploration into the CED,
RCA’s very strange yet still somehow marketed videodisc system which effectively
used vinyl records to store up to 2 hours of video. We went over its history and a bit
of the context surrounding why RCA was bothering to do this in part one, so if you haven’t
seen that, you may want to consider clicking that clicky thing up there.
Anyway, let’s get on …
[ video glitches uncontrollably]
[THUD]
...get on with the show.
We’ll begin by taking a closer look at this player, as well as the device that RCA thought
was too complicated to manufacture despite the fact that they were selling them already.
On a fundamental level, the RCA videodisc player is merely a record player.
It has a bit of a funky pickup, as well as an automated “tonearm” if you will, but it’s still
just a spinning disc with a needle tracking a spiral groove. An insanely tiny groove on
an insanely delicate disc, but with the engineering complexities devoted to the disc manufacturing
process and not the player, it was thought that it could have perhaps might have been
maybe a good idea maybe possibly. As a matter of fact, in an early demonstration of the
system, Richard Sonnenfeldt, the Vice President of VideoDisc Operations put it simply;
And that’s exactly how it panned out. These discs are marvels or precision manufacturing,
but the players are mainly just a bunch of off-the-shelf parts. The most complicated
bit of the player is how it manages fine tracking control. I briefly showed you the visual search
function and explained that an electromagnet can move the stylus with fine control, but
I didn’t really explore that at all and I should because it is admittedly impressive.
Look in the stylus compartment and you’ll see this pair of little coils. These are controlled
by the player’s electronics in order to move the stylus, either to get it out of a locked
groove situation, or to advance or retreat across the disc’s surface for visual search. You’ll also
see this little solenoid which can lift the stylus off the surface of the record.
And it does a surprisingly good job. With a disc in good condition, the visual search
is very fluid. Strikingly so. Way better than any VCR ever managed, and practically as good
as the butter-smooth search of a CAV laserdisc. The only thing you’ll occasionally notice
is some screen-tearing since there are multiple frames encoded with each rotation of the disc.
But since the concept of screen-tearing was, I’m pretty sure, not even a recognized phenomenon
in 1981, well who cares?
I believe the reason it works so well is precisely because the discs have the synchronization
signals hard-coded onto them, and their speed is constant. Even if the stylus skips into
the next track mid-frame, it doesn’t interrupt the video signal at all because each adjacent
track is EXACTLY four frames ahead or behind, down to the precise location on the scanline.
So even though it lacks the fine control of a laser-optical system, the effect is exactly
the same.
That’s pretty much the only impressive thing about how the player works, though.
Everything else is cost-optimized as far as possible.
Were you looking for a composite video output?
NOPE.
Too expensive. Ya get RF out only, suckers.
As mentioned before, the turntable motor is
just a bog-standard AC motor and drives it with a belt, though I should note that later
models had a direct-drive turntable that could stop itself in a defined position to allow
for a fancier disc loading operation. But more on that later.
My favorite cost-cut has to do with the mechanism which moves the stylus carriage. Notice how
the function lever engages this felt clutch. When the lever is in the load position, the
mechanism which moves the carriage is entirely disengaged. Why? Well, because they used the
action of you insterting the caddy to move the carriage back to the start point.
It’s...
a little violent.
[ mechanical thunks and clunks of this incredibly refined disc loading system ]
Look at that! It’s just…
so inelegant. Just…
WHAM!
You can, with conscious effort, make this not-quite-as-bad if you slowly insert the caddy, but I mean…
who was gonna bother with that? I will say, though, that if you for some reason are using one
of these machines daily, you probably should make that effort.
So anyway, once the stylus has been belligerently put back in its place, and you move the lever
to play, the clutch re-engages and now the player has control over where the stylus lands.
And the first thing it does it bump the carriage forward to hopefully find the start of the disc.
Oh, and since I haven’t yet mentioned it, the disc is read from the outside in,
like a normal record, and not from the inside out, like a Laserdisc and the vast vast majority
(if not all) of its optical disc offspring.
From here, the player just monitors the track signalling to be on the lookout for problems.
If the user doesn’t press any buttons, it’s just gonna bump the pickup forward every once
in a while as the stylus tracks the disc. If it notices it’s in a locked groove,
it will try to get itself out by kicking the stylus forward with that electromagnet.
Unfortunately, as these machines have aged, the felt clutch and the belt on its motor have worn to the
point where the carriage itself can get stuck, and the player wasn’t programmed with any
way to rectify that. This can create the appearance of a badly damaged disc, when in fact it’s
a problem with the player. To get out of this issue, you can use the rapid access buttons
to move the carriage backwards, and then use visual search to get back to where you were.
Now that’s a modern problem related to age, so I doubt it was an issue back in the day.
And I want to point out that there is an optical encoder here that the player uses to monitor
the carriage’s movement, but apparently this is only used for the rapid access function,
as it barely turns at all under normal operation.
Shame they couldn’t have made that a little more useful.
You may have noticed that the player has a pause button. Well, instead of providing a
freeze-frame, that simply blanks the screen.
On this television is shows a white screen, but that's the television doing that,
not the player.
Because there are four frames of video encoded
with each rotation, it’s impossible for the player to provide a real freeze-frame
without a frame buffer, and that would certainly not be possible cheaply in 1981. However,
there was a mode called “page mode” which would lock the stylus and force it to read
the same four frames over and over again, and it can be activated on this player by
holding both the forward and reverse visual search buttons. This mode, though not officially
supported with this player, could be used for navigating more advanced interactive discs,
but more on that later.
Now, we’ve basically covered everything this player can do. Remember, its goal wasn’t
to be super exciting or to be particularly advanced. It was trying to be a modified record player,
and to that extent - it is.
Now let’s look at a VCR.
This RCA VDT-600 is a Matsushita-built
model introduced in 1979. Removing the case reveals right away there’s a lot more
going on here.
You’ve got your rotary video head drum.
An erase head,
an audio head,
and a tracking pulse head.
Moveable tape-guides are used to thread the tape around the drum.
There's a capstan and pinch roller to move the tape across all these heads, which is done at three
different speeds with this model.
And there’s a lightbulb on a stick,
which is used to detect when the tape has reached the end
by shining a light through the cassette itself,
through the clear tape leader, and out these holes on the side.
All VHS machines detect the end
of the tape optically, that’s the reason the ends of the tape are clear, but these
really early ones use an incandescent light bulb for the light source, rather than infrared
LEDs of newer machines.
All of that stuff is just part of the tape transport. I haven’t even mentioned the
electronics which deal with the tape’s signals, how tracking is accomplished, the fact that
the video heads are coupled through a rotary transformer, or the simple fact that the tape
is being helically scanned.
If you want to learn more about video tape technology,
you can check out this much earlier video of mine, but be warned,
it’s a much earlier video of mine.
Anyway, now you can see why RCA thought the videodisc might still make sense. This VCR
is horrendously complicated compared to a CED player, and it also lacks some useful
features like a real time display or smooth visual search, with this particular VCR not
having any sort of visual search function at all. And these things were not cheap to
manufacture. The precision required to make the head drum and transport was pushing the
limits of mass production at the time, so these machines were sold for outlandish prices,
with this particular unit likely retailing for about $1,250, close to $5000 in today's money.
Knowing that VCRs were outside the reach of many consumers, and also knowing about how
difficult it must be to mass-produce pre-recorded tapes, RCA thought the CED would still have
a meaningful place in the market.
And they were… kinda right, for a while anyway.
Remember, both the CED as well as the Laserdisc were pioneers in home video, as although the VCR
would eventually become the device you’d watch the latest flicks on, at this point
in time it was simply too expensive to use $20 blank cassettes, spend a couple hours
recording onto them, and sell them for a reasonable price. So, nobody knew how home video would
be received. Nobody would know until somebody tried.
And you could argue RCA’s experiment was the first successful attempt. Although MCA
DiscoVision had gotten laserdiscs out earlier, it never got too much traction. RCA seems
to have done a better job with licensing content, and while their discs certainly haven’t
held up well over time, early laserdiscs were plagued with issues and a lot of mistakes were
made learning to manufacture them.
To their credit, though RCA took their sweet time getting this
product to market, they did at least iron out all the kinks and release something that
actually worked well.
In fact, those who bought the players really liked them. They liked them so much that
it's no wonder the average purchaser of this player
is also buying from 20 to 30 of these discs
in the very first year of ownership.
That was surprising to RCA, in fact they were selling
about twice as many discs per household as they had expected. Their goal of having the
system in 50% of American homes by the end of the decade was incredibly optimistic,
but they did produce over half a million players, and with the help of other OEMs, a total of
about 750,000 players were produced.
Still, it was clear early on that things weren’t going that well. Initially, they only sold about
half as many players as anticipated, and the public at large seemed pretty apathetic.
I mentioned in my video on Laserdisc that a large part of why it (laserdisc) never really
took off was that home video was an entirely new, and completely foreign concept. On the
other hand, a VCR which could record shows while you’re away, or which could record
one show while you watch another, was a true problem-solver. RCA seems to have had better
success with convincing the public to take a leap of faith into the land of home video than
laserdisc did, but not nearly as much success as they needed.
However, they didn’t abandon the project right away. They did make some improvements.
Notice how this disc has a blue caddy.
In the CED ecosystem, blue caddies usually mean the disc is in stereo,
and later players were able to decode the stereo sound to be output over RCA jacks.
And even on this mono player, you can tell that the sound quality could
be quite good depending on the disc.
STAR WARS!!!!!
But I was going into Tosche Station to pick up some power converters!
Oh, and some later models did feature composite
out, too. The much sleeker 2nd generation players had a semi-automated disc load mechanism,
whereby you would only need to insert the caddy about ⅔ the way in, and it would take
it from you, release the spine, and spit the empty caddy back out again for you to remove.
Now, I used to have one of those players, and I’ll tell you that while it’s pretty cool,
it dramatically slows everything down. Especially disc flips, since you have to wait
for the stylus to return to the park position, have the player return the disc to the load
position, and then once it finally lets you put the caddy back in, the motorized action
prevents you from doing a quick one of these. Sadly, that player never worked right so I
got rid of it years ago, but I’ve put some links in the description so you can see some
of those players in action.
Regardless of that little annoyance from the later players,
RCA did plan on using the digitally-encoded position
signals of the disc to enable things like true random access and discs with chapters.
However, that never got far before RCA threw in the towel. In April of 1984, RCA formally
abandoned the system, announcing players would no longer be manufactured. The remaining stock
of players were sold at steep discounts, and people did buy them because RCA committed
to producing discs for three more years.
That’s right, RCA was so surprised with how many discs people were buying that they
decided, well nobody’s buying new players, but at least those who own them are making
us some decent money. Unfortunately they didn’t make it through to their three year commitment,
not only because sales of the new discs started to fall as owners abandoned the format, but
also because in a somewhat cruel case of irony, RCA was bought by their original owner, GE,
in 1985 and swiftly broken to pieces. What was once a huge company with their hands in
the buckets of communications, broadcasting, television, music, and at times even the military
industrial complex, was now a bit of quick cash for GE,
and a heaping pile of garbage.
Although discs did in fact keep getting made for about a year after GE’s acquisition,
by 1986 the format was officially dead.
So. What went wrong? And what could have been had things gone better?
Well, fundamentally what went wrong was that the system was delayed, delayed, and delayed further,
until finally it was delayed again
and subsequently delayed before its final delay happened
before its eventual delayed released. RCA’s internal target was a 1977 release, though personally
I think that might have been a little too late to be truly successful, so let’s just
imagine they had managed to pull this off in only 11 years and get it out in 1975
In 1975, there were basically no VCRs anywhere.
Yeah, there had been these weird experimental things kicking around for a while,
and I hear Sony’s getting ready to launch this new Betamax system,
but you gotta be real dedicated to the idea of recording TV at this stage in the game.
And fairly rich.
But, here comes RCA with their fantastical videodisc! A player for
only $500? And some of my favorite movies available to own for as little as $20?
Hmm.
That sounds intriguing.
The magic of the RCA VideoDisc.
A simple, affordable record that, like magic,
can bring not just sound, but sound and pictures.
Clear, beautiful pictures right into your living room.
I would bet good money that if this system was out in 1975, it would have been a big deal.
For one thing, in hindsight these discs and caddies are comical compared to a videocassette.
But, in 1975 I suppose they wouldn’t seem too out of place.
Music still comes on these things,
and the videodisc is only marginally larger. By the way, I’m going to take this opportunity
to admire how RCA used a circular theme in most of their artwork to really hammer home
that there is in fact a disc in here.
I sound sarcastic probably but honestly I love this aesthetic.
In 1975, this would have been the only way to turn your television into SelectaVision,
and doesn’t that just sound neat?
We’ve never had movies at home!
You know what we’re gonna do? We’re gonna
♫ bring the magic home ♫
♫ with RCA ♫
And it will be wonderful.
The fact that RCA sold half a million players, and a few millions discs, 4 years after the
VCR was pretty well introduced should prove in and of itself
that the idea was actually quite sound.
So in a world where VCRs just... weren’t a thing yet this would probably be an extremely
compelling product. And, with home video having proven itself before videocassette
recorders truly became affordable, many people may have seen little reason to buy a VCR.
At least, until they got really cheap.
With a robust installed base of, maybe, 10 million units by 1980, blockbuster films in
theaters could expect to make another $20 or $30 million after they’re on home video,
and you just know movie studios would jump on that bandwagon real quick. With the greater
manufacturing capacity financed by this successful system, RCA could start manufacturing more
niche content like television shows, and maybe third-parties would get into making their
own discs, and oh god this is horrible!
If RCA had succeeded here, and everyone was
selling their content to be owned on videodisc, would the VCR have been…
outlawed?
You might recall that there was a supreme court case on whether videocassette recorders violated
copyright law, and we in no small part have this wonderful man
[to thank, but Alec didn't say those words for some reason] for settling that with with an emphatic "no".
Yes I know this disc is in horrible shape, but come on, I’m not gonna
pass up an attempt to use this picture of Mr. Rogers on a videodisc, I mean duh.
That case was settled in 1984, when it was clear that the CED was a disaster. But if CEDs
had become successful, and everyone from television studios to independent filmmakers was putting
their stuff on CED, then suddenly the case against time-shifting becomes a lot stronger.
Of course you can’t tape your own TV shows, since NBC is gonna release that season next
October. That would be infringing on their ability to make a profit, and we cannot have
that oh no. As a matter of fact, movie studios kept on lobbying for some sort of legislative
action from Congress making time-shifting illegal, and the fact that they were making
serious money from rentals and home video sales is cited as one of the main reasons
Congress basically said buzz off.
Though, to be fair, requesting that you buzz off seems to be Congress’s default strategy these days.
That horrible hypothetical aside, a 1975 release would also have beaten Discovision to market,
and I have a feeling Philips and MCA would just give up were that to have happened. See,
though the existence of laserdisc was, I don't think, really hurtful to the CED,
confusion between the two standards was definitely a thing,
so having just one videodisc on the market
would further help RCA. And, RCA didn’t repeat Sony’s mistake and be real stingy
with the licensing of their tech. They were open to third party OEMs getting involved,
in fact Hitachi, Sanyo, and Toshiba all manufactured third-party players, so it’s unlikely there
would have been a VHS of discs to unseat RCA’s CED.
Now, of course, RCA didn’t manage to get their product out in 1975. But they still
thought it would be worth trying. Their thought that the cheap-to-make discs and inexpensive
player would be a good value compared to a VCR wasn’t wrong. But they fundamentally
misjudged something about the home video market.
RCA basically forgot about the concept of rental.
OK, "forgot" isn’t quite fair, but their research led them to believe that people
would prefer to own a movie than rent a movie, and with that stuck in their heads, VCRs could
never make sense.
But of course, for the VCR, rentals were a perfect two birds one stone scenario. Pre-recorded
VHS tapes are expensive and time-consuming to manufacture, sure,
but if you’re renting them, well you’re spreading its use out between 10 or 20 people.
And of course, that means you only need a
tenth or a twentieth the number of tapes as you would if people were buying them, so tape
duplication facilities don't need to be huge.
Really, this was the one thing that RCA failed to imagine. Their product essentially
relied on economies of scale and people wanting to buy their movies,
and lots of them. That would in fact get expensive
real quickly if you were buying pre-recorded VHS cassettes. But with a VCR, you could not
only just pop down to your corner video store, and pay something like $5 to borrow a movie
for the night, but you could also record TV while you were away. And once people started
getting into that groove, they weren’t interested in RCA’s.
God I love puns.
Well. I didn’t think I was going to end up making three videos about this format…
but it looks like I am. Before I end this one, though, have you noticed something about
the CED? Those of you who know a thing or two about Laserdiscs will know that they come
in two flavors, CAV and CLV. CAV discs only held 30 minutes per side, but CLV discs could
hold an hour by slowing the rotational speed of the disc as it played, making use of a
disc’s geometry.
Well?
CEDs are CAV!
They spin at a constant speed of 450 RPM. And yet,
they hold an hour per side.
If RCA had said, you know what? We’re gonna make the players a bit more
expensive by using a variable-speed motor, but at the same time we’ll get 2 hours of
video on each side, I think that might have made the format work. They had incredible
information density on these discs, but wasted a lot of potential by using a constant rotational speed.
If they figured out constant linear velocity, two disc titles would essentially be eliminated,
and most movies wouldn’t even need a flip in the middle! Double-feature specials could
be sold, two classic films for $20! And, had television shows started to be released on
CED, an entire season could fit across just 4 discs, with bonus footage!
Look, it’s a little late, but if I had a time machine…
I might just whisper some thoughts into somebody’s ears.
For now, I hope you enjoyed part 2. I think it’s safe to say that had RCA just timed
this a little better, the CED wouldn’t have failed. And I also think it’s a fair bet
that had that happened, our media landscape would be quite different. Maybe VCRs wouldn’t
be illegal, but you can bet that the home video scene would look nothing like it does today.
Well, streaming is king today, so make that…
But you can bet that the home video
scene of the 1980’s and into the 2000’s would look nothing like it does today.
In the third and (probably) final part, we’ll look at why RCA couldn’t get this product
out in time. It turns out that story is a lot more involved than at first you might
think. I’m waiting on materials to arrive, so I may do something entirely different next,
but be sure to subscribe if you haven’t already so you won’t miss part 3.
As always, I’d like to thank all of the wonderful people supporting this channel through
Patreon, with special thanks going to the fine folks scrolling up your screen. It’s
with the support of viewers like you that I can make videos like this, and I really
appreciate your support. If you would like to join these people in supporting my work
with a pledge of your own, you can check out my Patreon page through the link on the end
screen, or in the description. Thanks for your consideration, and I’ll see you next time!
♫ regrettably smooth jazz ♫
...and that would certainly nuh bu baa buh buh buh
You may have noticed that the player has a pause button, well….
There was a noise.
Over there.
Cool.
...clear tape leader, and out these holes on the sides of the …
woah! I skipped some words!
The discs are marvels of pre… oh yeah. Hang on.
This is going so incredibly well.
So well.
‘Cause we’ve planned this all out. Definitely didn’t rush anything.
Arrgh. Come on.
Come on. Be a good little defeat device.
[click]
Thank you.
Look at that, it’s just so… [gestures and flails really oddly]
No.
And also knowing about how difficult it must be - this is a very loud rattly cassette.