[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.
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.
