Now that we’ve looked at how rice cookers
work, it’s time to get back to the CED.
Yes, we are now on Part 5 of this three-part
series…
at some point this series will be over.
Will this be the video that concludes it?
Well, at the time that I’m writing these
words, it looks like it.
But we won’t really know until we get to
the end, will we?
So, let’s not beat around the bush and get
right to it.
As a refresher, the CED is RCA’s ultimate
exercise in beating around the bush.
An idea first conceived in the mid 1960’s,
but ultimately delayed into the 1980’s,
and delayed for a ton of reasons mostly to
do with mismanagement and corporate politics.
I’m gonna put these away now....
We left the story in the year
♫ Stars and Stripes Forever ♫
when Edgar Griffiths, a videodisc naysayer, took the helm at RCA.
Things didn’t look too great for the project,
especially because their Japanese competition
was beginning to heat up.
But let’s not talk about that, let’s go
back to 1974.
Uh-oh, here comes a twist!
Back in 1974, RCA had sent representatives
to Japan to try and license their videodisc
technology to Japanese manufacturers.
Now, you might be saying to yourself, really?
Didn’t you just say something about the
Japanese being competition?
Wasn’t it the case that they didn’t have
anything to do with the CED?
Well, in the end, this was largely true.
But initially, RCA was trying
- hoping -
to establish their soon-to-be-called CED as a unifying standard in the industry.
They offered really generous terms to various
Japanese companies, hoping that they could
get lots of third-parties involved and avoid
a potential format war.
There were a couple of big problems, though.
First, these demonstrations in Japan didn’t
go so well.
The demonstration units burned through playback
styluses like there was no tomorrow, and the
discs were extremely hit-or-miss.
To those within RCA who had expressed doubts
in the system,
uh this only strengthened those doubts.
And frankly, they saw the performance of the
system in Japan as an embarrassment.
The second big problem?
Well, RCA wouldn’t find out about that for
a little while.
But, suffice it to say they let the cat out
of the bag, and way too early.
They weren’t anywhere near done ironing
out the kinks, and the Japanese knew that.
Matsushita specifically expressed concerns
about the disc manufacturing process, and
had even suggested that RCA set up a manufacturing
plant in Japan to help take care of that problem.
With suggestions like that, it sure seemed
like Matsushita was on RCA’s side.
I mean, they’re being so helpful!
They were among six companies that had taken
RCA up on their incredibly generous deal.
For just $3,000, RCA sold them a prototype
player, sample discs, and engineering drawings.
Whether this generosity was out of desperation
or whether RCA was perhaps irresponsible is
unclear, but in any case, Matsushita signalled
that they were all in, and they began doing
their own work on the concept.
We are going to return now to the year
♫ Stars and Stripes Forever ♫
when Griffiths 
(who remember did not care for this project)
was now in charge of RCA at large.
But one thing that you should know is that
JVC, that’s the Japan Victor Company,
funnily enough born from the Victor Talking Machine
Company and thus at one point owned by RCA
(at least until World War II broke out),
was at this time owned by Matsushita.
Interestingly, Graham refers in her book to
Matsushita as being JVC’s parent company,
and … ehhh I’m not sure that’s really
the best way to put that.
Wikipedia simply says they were the majority
stockholder, and Panasonic’s own website
(Panasonic is the main consumer-facing brand
of Matsushita in the US)
says they “formed a capital alliance” with JVC in 1954.
In any case, Matsushita and JVC were good buds!
Remember that.
Up ‘till now, RCA had learned that basically
everything they were doing wasn’t working.
The auto-coater didn’t improve disc yields
at all.
The discs were still wicked fragile.
Labs and the consumer division in Indianapolis
still weren’t working together all that well.
And in general, it looked like Griffiths had
plenty of reasons to just axe this project.
This was when Griffiths commissioned that
report comparing it to Betamax which you may
recall from the last episode.
And here’s where things stood.
Richard Sonnefeldt, who was the head of the
videodisc project, argued that if they pulled
out of videodisc, it would be strike three
for the company.
Already their image wasn’t great what with
all the terrible business they had been doing,
and they announced both Holotape and Magtape
without actually delivering.
If they couldn’t move on this third incarnation
of SelectaVision…
they’re out.
Moreover, the promises they had made to their
Japanese investors were presumably still good.
If they moved forward they could get perhaps
$100 million in licensing revenues.
Even if the product ultimately failed, they
could still have some sort of licensing from
other patents.
Sonnenfeldt made the case that having come
this far, it would be silly to quit.
And he believed that, given the progress they
had made, they could get it out in April of 1978.
But that was still a ways off.
And the Japanese were encroaching on RCA not
only with video recorders, but also with consumer
electronics in general.
No longer was buying a color television a
choice between RCA and Zenith.
Now there’s Sony, Panasonic, and Hitachi,
among others.
They were being squeezed out on all sides,
and their existing dealer network was getting
tired of the situation.
When it came time to make the final decision,
Griffiths gathered all 17 managers of the
Videodisc project for a vote.
Should we proceed?
Or should we cut our losses?
The vote was 1 in favor of withdrawal, 5 abstaintions,
and eleven votes to continue.
Griffiths agreed to keep going, but as a compromise
measure, they would enter into negotiations
with Sony and Matsushita to produce a videotape
recorder that they could market through their
dealer network.
And THAT’s how the SelectaVision name ended
up on VCRs from Matsushita
before it ended up on their own damn product.
Side-note, this is unrelated to the CED story,
but since its come up in the past on this channel,
I feel I can’t ignore the fact
that right here, in this very meeting,
the fate of the videotape format war was essentially sealed.
Matsushita gave more favorable terms to RCA
than Sony, and importantly they went along
and bodged a long-play recording mode for
them which Sony wasn’t willing to do.
RCA’s decision to go with Matsushita and
the VHS format is likely the single most important
event in the entire format war.
In the years that followed, Griffiths became
somewhat of a convert.
Perhaps the result of a critical mention in
a Fortune magazine article, or possibly in
an effort to convince the folks at labs that he wasn’t
against them,
Griffiths became gung-ho on making Videodisc happen.
And progress was happening.
They still hadn’t figured out the keys to
everything, but their 1977 technical checkpoint
went pretty well.
Plus, they had demonstrated their system to
GE and it seemed like they might be interested
in working with RCA.
It began to look like maybe, just maybe, RCA
could get other American companies to follow
their lead.
And then they returned to Japan to follow-up
with their partners over there when they were
completely blindsided.
JVC had been lurking in the background this
entire time, and they had created a working
videodisc made without a complicated coating
and mastered using a simple optical method.
This disc seemed to be almost in all respects
better than what RCA was working on.
Some of you may have already guessed that
this disc is what would eventually go on to
become the VHD, or Video High Density format.
This new format was very similar to the CED.
In fact, one might say, suspiciously similar.
If you’d like to learn more about this format
you should check out Techmoan’s video on it.
I’ve linked it down below.
Now RCA was kinda forked, here.
You see, this new system, while pretty clearly
inspired by RCA’s ongoing efforts, was substantially
different in many respects.
This meant RCA probably couldn’t get any
sort of licensing revenue out of JVC,
at least not anything significant.
Whether or not JVC had stolen RCA’s idea
by way of Matsushita is unclear, but I mean…
that would be one hell of a coincidence, wouldn’t it?
RCA had now lost not only their competitive
advantage from proprietary disc mastering
and manufacturing, but also any hope of unifying
everyone under the same technical standard.
Not good.
Suddenly, it was a race against time on all
sides.
Sonnefeldt realised that JVC and Matsushita
could just come out with a videodisc format
of their own without warning.
Philips/MCA were now pushing DiscoVision as
a consumer format, and that’s looking like
it’s gonna launch soon.
And this whole time, videocassette recorders
are getting super popular,
and although RCA is selling tons of them, they’re actually
buying them from who could soon be
their main competitor in the videodisc space!
It’s jus….
AHHHH!
1977 was the year that RCA decided they would
pretty much just start over.
The labs and consumer division relationship
was still… not fantastic, and at this point
the labs were mostly cast aside.
Indianapolis would now be put in charge of
figuring out how to make this…
work,
and the labs would basically be there for support.
The first task at hand was to figure out how
to make the discs using JVC’s techniques.
You may recall that at this point RCA was
using injection molding for the discs,
which is NOT how conventional audio records are produced.
JVC’s videodisc prototype used plain, uncoated,
stamped discs, and RCA recognized this was
a better and more cost-effective idea.
So, if JVC had stolen their basic concept,
well now RCA stole their improvements so
I guess they’re even now.
The switch to conventional record-stamping
was not only simpler but also, just,
worked better.
Discs yields were way up and equipment costs
and complexity were way down.
Perhaps they should have thought to try that
themselves like, forever ago.
They also developed the electromechanical
mastering process, which also is incidentally
pretty much exactly how conventional audio
record stampers are produced.
They also switched to a diamond stylus from
the sapphire that they had been using,
and this increased playback stylus life tenfold.
OK, I need to interject here with some commentary.
1977 was the year this finally started to
come together, and yet, all these breakthroughs
were hardly breakthroughs at all!
Now, sure, I’m oversimplifying, but honestly
everything that just happened could be boiled down to;
“well what if we just tried making
discs like audio records?
And what if we just tried a diamond stylus,
like many record players have?”
Treating the CED like the glorified audio
record it was fixed a lot of problems.
Sure, they needed to innovate some of the
specifics, and coming up with the actual formulation
of PVC which would allow the disc to be conductive
was an entirely new innovation, in my eyes.
But seriously.
So much progress was made in this one year by attacking the problem with already existing techniques.
To me, this is the biggest piece of evidence
that the Labs was arguably more of a hindrance
than they were a resource.
Given that the people working there liked
to research shiny new phenomena and publish
their findings, it seems pretty unlikely
that anyone there would have said
“well, what if we just iterated on the technology
we already understand?”
In fact we know this wasn’t their cup of
tea, given how everyone there flocked to Holotape
rather than what would become the CED.
This rapid progress didn’t happen until
Indianapolis was given the lead, and the pressure
of restricted budgets caused them to consider
tried-and-true methods of the past.
And these happened to work.
And really well.
This just goes to show that a bunch of bright
minds in one place isn’t necessarily a recipe
for success unless they’re working towards
a common goal.
The Labs didn’t see themselves as working
on the Videodisc,
they were a research institution!
And everyone in the labs had their own pet
projects, so of course they were gonna push
for those to be incorporated into whatever
the consumer divisions were working on.
It took me until I re-read this section of
the book to realize how absurdly complicated
some of their ideas were.
What place do electron beams have in making
a disc stamper?
Why the hell wouldn’t you just do what you’ve
been doing for decades and physically cut the master?
Well, unless somebody asks that question,
nobody’s gonna try.
And if your job is to think up new things,
you’re probably not gonna ask that question.
The people in Indianapolis weren’t trying
to blow the minds of the world with new discoveries.
They were just trying to make the damn product
work.
And once they were given the lead, suddenly
a lot of pieces fell into place.
Funny what can happen when your division shares
a common goal.
If 1977 was the year of figuring out the obvious,
1978 was the year of
“let’s get going, shall we?”
As predicted, Matsushita decided that they
would rather back this new thing JVC was working on,
so there went any hope of having them
as a partner.
Adding to that pain was the fact that currency
fluctuations now meant RCA couldn’t make
much money on the VCRs they were importing
from Matushsita, and their hopes of importing
Japan-made videodisc players of their own
format pretty much dried up.
It became clear that if this system was to
have any chance of success, RCA would just
have to do it themselves.
And so, they did.
Now that they had, like, a plan, Laboratories
came back into the fold to work on specifics
like figuring out how to mass produce components
and whatnot.
And Indianapolis played a bigger role than
ever.
The various pilot tests that they had done
over the years were always being handled by
a scrappy team at the Rockland Road facility,
and now that team would grow to about 300
people in preparation for launch.
Luckily, this went pretty smoothly all things
considered.
Thanks to the fact that they had cracked the code using nothing but
[through clenched teeth]
modified record stamping equipment,
it wasn’t that hard to procure the equipment
and start production.
Plenty of companies made that sort of stuff.
If only they hadn’t been trying to reinvent
the wheel
[thorugh more intensely clenched teeth]
for the past decade.
The new conductive PVC formulation eliminated
the need for the auto coater which had caused
tremendous problems in each pilot program,
and really all they needed to do now was get
a catalogue of programs ready to go, and start
pumping out players and discs.
Unfortunately, the stars were not aligned.
Before launch, videodiscs were getting bad
press thanks to reliability problems with
the early Discovision players.
And the economy was heading into a recession.
And GE announced that they intended to back
JVC’s system.
And IBM had backed Discovision.
And videocassette recorders were getting cheaper
and were selling like hotcakes.
And nobody wanted to work with RCA.
So, alone, battered, and afraid, the system
finally launched in March of 1981
to little fanfare.
Of course, RCA would add their own fanfare
in 1982
♫ RCA's incredibly confident fanfare for the CED plays ♫
buh dah dah dah
dah dah dah daaaaaah
daa daa
dummm
BWAH DO DO DO DOOOOO
DUMMM
but that wouldn’t help.
[that cut was bloody perfect, wasn't it?]
Not even RCA’s dealers were interested in
pushing this product, as they had had their
hands full with VCRs for the past 4 years.
Two thirds of the dealers who had signed on
to sell the videodisc had backed out,
and that alone may have been enough to seal its
fate.
But even had that not happened, it’s important
to remember that the VCR was in nearly every
respect a better, more capable, and more convenient
product.
The only advantage RCA had with their videodisc
was cost, but that would only remain true
if the consumer attitude was to A) see no
reason to record live TV and B)
wanted to buy lots of pre-recorded content.
And of course the thing that RCA didn’t
see coming was rental.
I went over this in much greater detail in
my series on Laserdisc, but an important thing
to consider here is that RCA developed this
product before home video existed as a concept.
You could argue they were trying to invent
that concept, but unfortunately they were
catastrophically late.
If the CED had managed to be on the market
before the VCR had made much headway,
I’d wager that it would have been tremendously
successful.
If they had made even their 1977 deadline,
the choice would have been between a $400 machine with $15 movies
and a $1300 machine
which could record live TV.
That makes the value proposition of the CED
player much more compelling.
But by 1981, not only had people been watching
the price of VCRs steadily decrease through
four years of intense competition, but they could
also witness this home video rental market
start to appear.
Now, if they bought one of these VCRs, they
would not only be able to record live TV,
but they’d have access to a large library
of content.
And sure, mass producing pre-recorded videocassettes
was a slow and expensive process, but who
cares if a videotape of your favorite movie
costs $75 to buy if you can rent it for $3?
Also of note is the fact that you could get
practically anything on videocassette,
but your choices on CED were limited to what RCA
could cobble together.
They struggled to provide a wide library of
programming, and since relatively few people
bought the machines, even though disc sales
exceeded expectations, they could never justify
expanding production all that much.
To their credit, though, they did manage to
have a remarkably large library when you consider
only half a million players ever existed.
But there was still a lot they just couldn’t offer.
And, uh, well one of the things they didn’t
offer was shall we say… mature content.
Graham mentions this mostly in passing as
an example of the lack of programming variety,
and I don’t believe she’s suggesting that
this would have saved the videodisc.
And hey.
Before this gets brought up, because of course
it will now that I’ve said this,
porn existed on Beta tapes, OK?
That whole explanation of Beta losing the
format war because Sony wouldn’t allow porn
is nothing but an urban legend, and we know
this because not only was there Beta in the
back room, but because Sony didn’t have
control over what was being put on their tapes.
Neither Betamax nor VHS were created to sell
content.
Let me repeat that.
Neither Beta nor VHS were created to sell
content.
JVC and Sony weren’t in the distribution
business, and they were not greenlighting
anything at all.
I’m only bringing this up because RCA WAS
in the distribution business, and it IS the
case that RCA was unwilling to put their name
on naughty movies, and since they were distributing
literally all of the content available for
their players, the only way we’d have gotten
that kind of Discpix would be if third party
manufacturers appeared.
Which of course didn’t happen because the
volumes just weren’t there.
This almost makes me wonder if the origins
of that VHS myth might be traced back to the
CED, because that story is what literally
happened in the case of RCA.
The real head-scratcher about the entire CED
ordeal is the why.
Why did RCA continue with this in the face
of so much competition?
Why did they think it could work?
Well, that’s a complicated issue.
In many respects, the CED’s role in the
company continually shifted.
Conceived as the sequel to color television,
SelectaVision would have undoubtedly been
tremendously successful had it been released
in the 1960’s.
But that didn’t happen, and in the meantime
priorities at RCA had changed.
Consumer electronics had stopped being the
primary business by the time David Sarnoff
had stepped down.
The diversification into computers, and of
course all the other businesses they had been
gobbling up under Robert Sarnoff’s questionable
leadership, meant SelectaVision was now just
one of many projects going on.
And since Labs was allowed to pursue three
different methods at once, and the consumer
divisions were also just doing their own thing
with Magtape, there was never a real coordinated
effort to make it work.
So it just floundered in the background.
Forever.
By the time RCA had become re-focused on their
goals after their computer division sell-off,
it was arguably too late already.
Real progress didn’t happen until VCRs were
already on the market.
And the sad irony is that RCA knew they couldn’t
afford to ignore that, hence the deal with
Matsushita.
If there’s one thing I can glean from this
situation, it’s that the CED was viewed
as a “last hurrah”.
A chance to return RCA to its roots of a consumer
electronics powerhouse, and to open up new
business as a new kind of media company--not
television,
but SelectaVision.
Of course, it failed catastrophically.
In the very beginning, RCA had made a series
of key assumptions that, if held true, would
probably mean the success of the CED.
These were that consumers would prefer a lower
price to more features,
that potential format confusion could be alleviated by their dealers,
and most importantly that videocassette recorders would remain expensive
because economies of scale apparently don’t apply to magnetic tape for some reason.
And also, of course, that consumers would
want to own a library of video, just as they
had amassed their libraries of music on LPs.
Nobody ever challenged these assumptions.
And that was quite foolish.
In 1972 those assumptions would almost certainly
hold up.
And perhaps they still rang true in 1977.
But RCA seemed unwilling to acknowledge the
changing landscape.
Consumer electronics was starting to become
the way it is today, with intense competition
pushing the boundaries of features and price
at an incredible pace.
It seems RCA was just unaware of this new
reality.
Four years wasn’t a long time to wait in the
1960’s.
But by the late ‘70s it certainly was.
Yet… they still tried.
In summary, a bunch of things doomed this
poor product.
The free-rein that Labs was given to just
do whatever with little regard to practical
matters prevented progress from ever being
truly coordinated, as did the general resentment
of the labs by other departments.
So years passed without anything to really
show for it.
Then, RCA had lost their way under Robert
Sarnoff and just… kinda stopped innovating
altogether for a while.
And by the time Griffiths was in charge, they
had just kinda forgotten how to innovate.
Griffiths made an earnest attempt in the late
‘70s to take RCA back to its roots and become
a true innovator once more.
He brought back the “His Master’s Voice”
tagline, long ago abandoned, and he really
tried to get RCA’s reputation back on good
footing.
And I think it says a lot that real progress
was made once the folks in Indianapolis were
essentially leading the project.
That team over there worked like RCA of old,
and they actually got results.
It was just too late to make much of a difference.
RCA had a lot of debt to cover by the time
1984 rolled around.
The CED had failed
spectacularly,
so there goes any chance of this covering it,
and while they did have some strategies going for how
to get out of that debt,
in the end they just couldn’t make it.
GE bought what was left in 1986, and sold
off many of those assets in the years to come.
Given how it panned out, the CED literally
was RCA’s last hurrah.
Is the failure of the CED what ultimately
killed RCA?
Well, not from a pure numbers sense, no.
There were far too many things going on at
RCA for the failure of one product to sink
the ship.
But I think it’s fair to say it was the
final nail in the coffin.
A lot was riding on the success of the CED.
Literally the entire company.
Had it gone according to plan, I think RCA
would still be around.
But let’s be honest.
It needed to be out about 6 years earlier
if it were really going to work.
Well.
That’s it.
We’ve finished the series, and I hope you
enjoyed it!
I’d like to mention here that RCA is dead.
But the brand lives on as one of those brands
that doesn’t actually mean anything at all.
You might find an RCA-branded whatever on
store shelves but let’s be real.
It’s probably crap.
Maybe you’ll find the odd gem here and there
but seriously, it’s not like the legacy
of David Sarnoff lives on in this countertop
dishwasher.
Oh, and one other thing.
While this officially ends the series, it
was suggested to me that I could follow-up
on some of the unanswered questions you may
have regarding this disastrous format.
For example, some people have wondered if
you can insert the disc into the caddy upside down.
Well, you can!
At the edge of the spine there’s a little
side indicator, so that is really what tells
you which side is which.
I would imagine most people were careful to
make the sides match the label, but there
is indeed nothing stopping you from putting
the caddy in “upside down”.
If there’s anything you’d like to know
about the CED that I haven’t covered, please
leave a comment!
Of course, a huge thank you to the people
who support this channel through Patreon.
Without your support I couldn’t spend so
much time on big long series like this, so
thank you!
You can join these folks if you like through
the link on the endscreen or in the description.
Thanks for your consideration, and I’ll
see you next time!
♫ disastrously smooth jazz ♫
We are done!
The series is over!
Yeah!
*inhales*
 no.
Hoping that they could sell… 
beh bu ba da daba da dubba da
Well in the end, this was large-ly true.
But initially….
Why did I say “largely” like that?
They offered really generous terms to various
Japanese companies hopening…
hopening?
This is not going well, this is gonna take
forever!
I have to get the book which I left…
upstairs.
Hang on.
Got it!
Side-note, this is unrelated to the CED story
but since it comes up in the…
(awkward pause)
since it’s come up.
It’s as in it’s has… it has.
Disc yields were way up and equispment…
equispment?
And importantly, they went along and made
for them …
(another awkward pause)
Skipped a line
The various ta..
buh buh buh buh buh buh buh
buh buh buh buh
That would only remain true if consumer attitudes
were to A)
(snaps fingers)
What was that line?
That would only remain true if the consumer
attitude… if THE consumer attitude.
OK.
Griifiths made…
(clears throat)
Griffiths made a…
Griffiths is a hard name to say.
You can join these folks if you like through
the link in the endscreen or on....
Ugh.
...through the link in the ends 
...aaahh
You can join these folks if you like through
the link in the end..
ON. THE. ENDSCREEN.
(Yells)
IN the description!
Ugh!
You can join these folks if you like through
the link in the endsc…
I *bleeping* Augh!!
Hey there, hows it going?
You just watched 27 minutes about a long-dead home video format.
If you've been following from the beginning, you've watched a good feature-length film's worth.
How does this make you feel?
The answer is awesome!
You're awesome ;)
