It’s 1964.
Finally.
And you work at RCA
Laboratories!
Management has told you that we need to come up with some sort of product
that would let consumers watch pre-recorded content on their ordinary television sets.
How exactly are you gonna do that?
Why, with holograms, of course!
Welcome to the fourth and perhaps not final chapter in the saga that is the RCA SelectaVision Videodisc,
also known as the CED or 
Capacitance Electronic Disc system.
It’s been, uh…
a while
since we last looked at this so you may have
forgotten a few things.
You can, of course, check out this clicky thing to see the playlist on CED
or you can find a link down in that there description thing.
I will, however,
recap the things most important to this chapter.
RCA Laboratories had been, for years, a source
of angst and envy in the company.
They seemed to have limitless resources to do whatever
they wanted to do,
and it was up to the consumer divisions at RCA to actually apply their science work
to produce a usable consumer product.
Attempts to make the labs carry an idea from
theory to market pretty much never worked,
and factions in the labs had formed between
“make useful things” and
“discover new science things”.
Having had tremendous success with three successive
technologies, radio, television, and color television,
but also having learned that these
golden eggs were not forever lasting,
RCA sought the next big thing, the sequel to color
television.
And that would be home video.
They had no idea how they were gonna do that
quite yet, but gosh darnit they were gonna do it.
And fast.
So fast that it would take 17 years.
Spoiler alert.
In 1964 there were four different ideas floating around.
One involved using magnetic
tape.
See, this Japanese company called…
So-knee?
Am I saying that right?
They (and a few others) had been working on magnetic tape-based video technology that they figured would
eventually get cheap enough for the consumer market.
But lots of people at RCA scoffed at that
idea, remembering the fiasco with the Videograph.
Still, there was enough support that a pilot
project was started in Indianapolis, chosen
because this was where the consumer division
was located.
Meanwhile, another idea was floating around.
This one, at the time called Discpix -
that’s DISC pix
- was the genesis of the CED.
To make Discpix practical, a lot of further work was needed.
While Thomas Stanley’s work
in the Systems Research Laboratory had demonstrated
the theoretical limits of storing information
on a vinyl disc, turning that theory into
practice required a ton of incremental work.
And this was exactly the sort of work that nobody in the laboratories wanted to do.
Remember, the Laboratories was staffed with
scientists.
They had attracted graduates of esteemed universities,
promising that they could continue their work at RCA.
Which is what they did.
They were excited to discover
new things and publish their results!
Not to optimize an existing technology.
Where’s the fun in that?
Building enthusiasm for the Discpix project
was thus very difficult.
The laboratory directors  had figured that the best thing to pursue would be the capacitive pickup approach
suggested by Stanley’s work.
But
- and I'm not kidding -
the response to this was more-or-less
...mmm BORING.
The researchers, quote, “viewed
this as the least interesting method and continued
to work on multiple alternatives.”
One of these was the Photopix disc.
You know those Viewmaster toys? With the little discs with stereoscopic images on film?
Yeah, this was essentially that, but with a bigger disc,
with way more (and way tinier) photographs,
and, if that doesn’t seem silly enough,
this would be scanned by a vidicon tube to
turn that into a television signal.
So in essence this was a microscope with a television
camera attached to it, and this was somehow
gonna be feasible for a consumer product in
1964.
Sure.
But in fairness this seemed less bonkers than
the capacitance setup.
Because, as it turns out, this was in fact very hard to make work.
Jon Clemens, a newly-hired engineer from MIT had given the Discpix project a boost,
but he discovered within his first year that it couldn’t work as originally conceived.
There were simply too many complex interdependencies that would be exceedingly difficult to reconcile
in an expedient and economically sensible fashion
he said with tedious phrasing.
In 1966 it seemed like nobody wanted Discpix
anymore.
I mean, did they ever?
And work had been somewhat tabled.
A few staff shake-ups
moved people around, created some new divisions
(both literal divisions of RCA and divisions
between staff member ideologies)
and i’m gonna skip through all that because now we need to get to the even more hilarious-in-hindsight idea;
Holopix.
Holopix worked by storing *holograms*
on a vinyl disc, that would be hit with *a laser*
to create an image which would be read
by a vidicon tube and turned into a television signal.
Yep.
Now, this may sound incredibly complicated
and shockingly ahead of its time for 1964,
because it definitely was, but… 
this was cool sh**!
And people in the labs were like “LASERS?
HOLOGRAMS?
SIGN ME UP!”
And so work on Holopix moved quickly.
I mean, seriously, if you, an enthusiastic graduate from MIT or whatever
had just gotten a job at RCA, and you had the choice between
“make records hold more
stuff”
and “use LASERS to stimulate HOLOGRAMS”
which would you choose?
And, even weirdlier, this actually sorta worked.
You see, they were able to stamp discs just like a normal record, and they demonstrated that, yeah,
you could fire a pulsed laser at the thing, and the interference from the holographic surface
on the disc could be read by a vidicon tube and turned into an image on a television.
Color me surprised.
But, of course, lasers had *barely been invented*,
and vidicon tubes weren’t exactly mass-produced items,
so two huge problems needed to be solved
for this to have even a remote chance of being economically viable.
But like.
Lasers, man.
And holograms.
Neat.
But then. Oh no. Out of nowhere, in late 1966,
The New York Times published an article on
a new thing CBS was working on called the
EVR.
This electronic video recorder was an “oh crap” moment, and RCA started freaking out.
Of note, CBS was keeping quiet about it, in fact, they denied the reports.
But this even got The Big Cheese David Sarnoff worried.
CBS was, as you may recall, the arch nemesis
of RCA.
RCA had been able to put them in their place after the color television wars,
but that didn’t mean they couldn’t pounce out of nowhere.
Which is apparently what they
were doing.
So, in 1967, RCA was firmly in
“DO SOMETHING!”
mode.
Discpix was back on, Holopix was given more funding,
and even Photopix had been revived
and turned into Phototape.
In fact, Holopix also went from pix to tape once it was discovered that a disc couldn’t hold enough information,
but a loop of plastic tape could.
So now it’s three competing things, Holotape, Phototape, and Discpix.
You’ll notice that none of
these are using magnetic tape because people
at RCA labs were still firmly in the belief
that that would never be economically viable.
And now we must explain that, in addition
to this urgency, things at RCA were to take
yet another sudden change.
♫ sudden and very tacky muzak ♫
...another sudden change.
David Sarnoff was in failing health, and he would step down from his role to be replaced by his son, Robert.
The role of the laboratories was yet again
to shift and yet another push would be made to make them, like, do stuff beyond fundamental research.
And thus begins the next chapter in this soon-to-be
catastrophe,
the Robert Sarnoff years.
Now, I’ll admit here, that I’m gonna gloss
over a ton of particulars.
There are a lot of reasons all this was about to go down and I don’t want to get into them all,
so please accept my apologies if I skip over some of
the minutia.
In many ways, CBS’s announcement of the EVR was necessary for the development of the CED.
Support within RCA was falling for a pre-recorded home video format,
especially since the research efforts were so disjointed and didn’t seem to be getting anywhere.
But with CBS announcing they planned to do what RCA was so-far hesitant to do,
suddenly the labs were pushed into making Holotape, Phototape, or Discpix work.
So RCA needed to settle on one of the three.
An effort was made to prioritize, and they settled on…
Holotape.
But also Discpix.
At this time, Thomas Stanley was in charge of the techological development for both projects,
and he recognized that while there were way more problems to solve for Discpix,
if they could be solved, it would make way more sense than Holotape.
But at the same time, Holotape presented more opportunities for proprietary technologies,
and that of course meant more patents.
So he formed two teams, one to work on Discpix, and the other on Holotape.
RCA was now in a race with CBS once again.
They wanted something to be presented to the public, preferably before CBS was ready,
and so they went into high gear.
Despite its incredible complexity, Holotape was further along and could be demonstrated before Discpix.
And so, in September of 1969, Holotape was selected
for demonstration.
And it was a bit of a disaster.
It worked!
That much is true.
But the pictures were not great.
There was no sound.
It was still extraordinarily complicated.
And, let’s not kid ourselves, magnetic tape was kinda becoming viable.
Don’t tell anyone at RCA
labs yet because they’re still in denial about that.
But you know who isn’t? 
The consumer divisions.
Remember how I said a pilot program was started in Indianapolis focusing on magnetic tape?
That was still going.
That would soon be a source of tension,
as you’ll see shortly.
And while Stanley had said, 
"don’t worry, we haven’t made a firm choice yet between
Holotape and Discpix", the Discpix team couldn’t
help but see a demonstration of the rival
system as a signal that they weren’t important
anymore.
So their work, already a bunch of tedious activities related to making this disc system barely functional,
slowed in frustration.
And this whole time, the old dynamic of “labs
does inventing, consumer divisions do everything else”
was still in the background.
And now it was even more complicated than ever, as a new Selectavision Venture Group
was making decisions about who was gonna do what.
To quote Graham,
(read the scrolling stuff, silly)
If that sounds ridiculously fragmented, that’s
because it was!
And nobody enjoyed being told what to do.
Especially the Laboratories.
This whole time, nobody was even remotely in agreement on virtually anything at all.
It was a disaster.
And yet somehow they were shooting for a public release of 1971.
Good luck.
With that.
Guess what didn’t happen?
And it didn’t happen for a huge number of reasons.
For one thing, it seems rather silly to remove Laboratories from so much of the technical work.
Why put the Electronics Components Division in charge
of making a feasible vidicon and laser?
Dontcha think the labs should have some input there?
But mainly it was just a result of the whole
“nobody can agree on anything” situation.
Not even the basic format specifications.
How can four teams in four divisions possibly
work together
if one group thinks this needs to hold an hour,
the other thinks it needs
to cost less than $3 to produce a tape,
and the other is still trying to cost-optimize
the vidicon tube?
And the fourth one is doing something?
But also, let’s not forget that RCA was
at this time a gi-freaking-gantic company
with their hands in many different places.
And one of those was computers.
Yeah, RCA had a lot to do with computer systems in the
1960’s.
Their Computer Division was formed mainly to compete with IBM,
and they produced
a variety of mainframe computers.
Indeed, they were the source of a few significant
innovations. But…
they never really had great success with it.
And in 1971 they decided to just give up and sell the computer division to UNIVAC.
At a huge loss.
And by huge, I
mean $490 million.
This, combined with an economic downturn,
did not bode well for Holotape.
In fact it kinda killed it.
Meanwhile, the consumer electronics
division in Indianapolis was still working
on their magnetic tape efforts.
Those rebels!
Ray Warren, who worked in Indianapolis, had
seen a demonstration of a new video tape system
from Philips in 1970 and thought he could
convince his bosses to take another stab at
videotape.
Now, tape was still really fiddly in these years.
One of the reasons Laboratories
was so against it was that it required high-precision
manufacturing to make the tape transports
compatible with pre-recorded tapes.
None of RCA’s divisions had that capability, and
it would be tremendously expensive to develop
such prowess, so why bother?
But Warren had an idea.
How about they farm that out?
So in 1971 they contracted with
Bell and Howell to produce the real finicky
bits for them.
And the Venture Group, still making decisions on behalf of everybody else,
gave this idea the green light.
And so Selectavision Magtape was now in the running.
I’m sure that will go over well at Laboratoires.
Meanwhile, CBS had thrown in the towel.
Their EVR system was going to cost just as much as a magnetic tape format, but couldn’t record.
So they gave up.
And another thing happened, too.
A European joint venture between
Telefunken and Decca had created the Teldec format.
♫ suddenly, terribly tacky muzak makes a comeback ♫
This was very similar to the concept
RCA had been working on for Discpix.
And, just as the existence of EVR had created a
sense of urgency for Holotape,
now the existence of Teldec renewed interested in Discpix,
and created that same sense of urgency for their team.
Suddenly, Discpix was back in business.
And now, a real internal showdown was about to occur.
The Venture Group had decided Holotape
was dead, and they decided they would
pursue both the Magtape and the Discpix system.
But there wasn’t enough money.
The accountants at RCA were strongly suggesting they choose between one of them,
and now Laboratories was in direct competition with the consumer products division in Indianapolis.
Which is of course great!
Because no matter which one is chosen, those two groups are gonna need to work together eventually.
And then, for a long time, nothing really happened.
Alright, we are skipping forward in time because things get kinda dull here.
Most important to know is that the losses from selling the computer division
just kept hurting the development
of both Magtape and Discpix.
There wasn’t enough money to establish programming for release.
And there wasn’t enough money to fix all of Discpix’s various problems.
In short, there just wasn’t enough money.
The cost-cutting and budget reductions moved people
around yet again, and as a sort of kick-in-the-teeth,
Avco’s Cartrivision system, an early home
video experiment using tape cartridges much
like what RCA hoped to do with Magtape, was
released in 1972 and sold very poorly.
In the end, the entire venture group, once charged
with figuring out the sequel to color television,
ceased to exist.
In October 1974, RCA announced that “yeah,
we’re giving up on this whole Magtape thing”.
The agreement with Bell and Howell had fallen
apart,
and Avco’s Cartrivision was a disaster.
It seemed like there was just no point continuing.
This was both good and bad for RCA.
For one thing it eliminated the in-fighting between
the pro-tape factions and the pro-disc factions.
But it also meant that they had left the magnetic
tape business, a business which was clearly on the rise.
Even if RCA didn’t want to admit it.
But now, finally, Indianapolis and the laboratories
in Princeton could be on the same team.
And surprisingly they were working together pretty
well.
Finally making an effort towards peace and harmony,
people from the labs would travel
to Indianapolis and vise-versa, which meant
they could finally understand each other’s challenges, and they could help one another overcome them.
Weird what can happen with
the power of cooperation.
The biggest challenge to overcome was arguably
the mastering method.
It was…
well it was way too costly and...
way too slow.
Now there was an
argument being made that a complicated mastering
technique could help insulate RCA from competition,
especially since the actual players themselves
would be pretty straight-forward to produce,
but at this point we’re talking a mastering process that took about a week to make one usable stamper.
So that’s not great.
But things improved swiftly. It looked like the
product could be released as early as 1975.
But then things got all corporately political
again, and the labs and Indianapolis were
at odds once more.
Ugh.
This story is so frustrating!
And then, to make matters worse, in 1973
RCA got wind of Philips and MCA’s new efforts
on what would eventually become Laserdisc.
This was a huge blow to the videodisc
efforts.
Philips/MCA seemed to have a much superior product, and corporate support for RCA’s efforts dried up.
Luckily, the R&D teams managed to make a number of significant improvements
despite the apparent animosity, and support was regained.
In the end the Philips
announcement only set back RCA’s timeline
by six months or so, but this now meant the
earliest possible release was 1976.
Apparently on the same team again, now the
consumer products division and labs needed
to settle on how to make the discs.
It became obvious that the conventional methods of producing vinyl audio records weren’t going to cut it.
The discs would need to be made in clean-room settings,
and injection molding seemed like it might be the right move.
This now meant that the research departments needed not only to prove that these methods would work,
but they also needed to procure the equipment
to produce the discs, which wasn’t exactly
a run to the Home Depot.
And all the while,
the divisions needed to periodically drop
what they were doing and present their progress
to management.
Which slowed them down a lot.
And none of this was helped by the constantly
shifting management landscape.
As soon as someone took a leadership role who liked the Videodisc project,
they were replaced by someone who didn’t.
Funding was frozen.
Then it was re-issued.
And during all this faffing about, Sony was hard at work on their soon-to-be-released
Betamax video recorder.
While this would ultimately spell the end for the hopes of RCA’s videodisc
(well, not specifically Betamax but videocassette recorders in general)
this had the short-term
effect of formally killing Magtape,
as there was clearly no point continuing to make that happen.
In March of 1975, RCA was ready to demonstrate
the videodisc to the public.
And a weird thing happened.
Though RCA didn’t think they were
necessarily in competition with Philips/MCA,
given at this point their laser-based
system wasn’t destined for home use,
the press found a juicy battle in the making and
suddenly RCA had competition they didn’t think they had.
But for the time being, the
press was on RCA’s side, painting the laser-based
system from Philips/MCA as needlessly complicated
and costly.
Still, now RCA had to deal with a PR situation they didn’t ask for.
Now, if you’re thinking, “well, why would
that be a problem?”,
let me tell you why that would be a problem!
RCA’s reputation was starting to get
pretty bad in the mid seventies.
Under Robert Sarnoff’s leadership, RCA went from a consumer products manufacturer
to a general business conglomerate.
They had acquired such wide-ranging
companies as Hertz rental cars, Coronet carpeting,
Random House publishing, and Banquet foods.
RCA suddenly stood for “Rugs, Chickens, and Automobiles” according to their detractors.
And this strategy was not going well, with profits seemingly in a free-fall.
Robert Sarnoff was ousted in 1975, just as the videodisc project was getting off the ground,
and his successor, Anthony Conrad, didn’t exactly care for the videodisc.
In fact Edgard Griffiths,
in charge of RCA’s electronics business
and a direct subordinate of Conrad, despised
it and urged Conrad to kill it.
Sonnenfeldt, the leader of the Videodisc project,
made a grand appeal to Conrad. He argued that
RCA needed another home run like Color Television,
and that CED would be it.
RCA had become rather risk-averse in this time, and this
put them way behind.
Rival television manufacturer Zenith had leapfrogged RCA in terms of quality and sales.
Zenith had adopted a “follower” position and was doing quite well with that tactic.
Zenith was able to make a lot of money just by improving on the work of others,
and some people argued that RCA should maybe start to do the same sorts of things.
But Sonnenfeldt reminded Conrad that RCA’s pioneering investment
in color television had been recouped many
times over.
They made their money by being leaders, not followers, and he urged Conrad to continue the videodisc project.
By now, the earliest the videodisc could possibly be
released to the public was May 1977,
and there was still a lot of work to do.
Sonnenfeldt convinced
Conrad to let him continue work on the videodisc
until mid-1976 at which point they would re-evaluate.
At this point, the discs were still being manufactured in a multi-step process which
relied on a machine called an auto-coater.
The procurement of these machines was delayed,
and when they finally got them, the videodisc
team was dismayed to find that this method
just…
sucked!
Discs deteriorated too quickly.
The yield
of good discs was abysmal.
And, at this point, the discs were still naked, so virtually any human contact would render them useless.
Already a 1977 release was out the window.
But Conrad remained supportive, and he told shareholders in August of '76
that they’d have the system ready for introduction in '78.
But then…
and I’m sure you’ll be surprised to hear
this,
Conrad was out.
He had resigned after admitting to failing to file his taxes for six years.
Yikes.
Well now. Who’s his successor gonna be?
And what will they think?
His successor was Edgar Griffiths, the guy who didn’t like the videodisc project at all.
That doesn’t bode well, does it?
Griffiths ordered a report
comparing the potential of the Videodisc against
Sony’s Betamax. That report suggested that
people favored the ability to record on tapes,
and their reusability, but also that price
was a significant factor.
If the videodisc could be substantially cheaper, than it would probably work.
The report suggested that RCA’s device should sell for less than $400,
and if that target could be met it would probably be at least a modest success.
But Griffiths still wasn’t happy.
He was
still leaning towards killing the project.
He asked all of the managers involved with
the project what the impact would be if he shut it down.
One argument against doing so
was that it would be a very bad look for RCA
given how badly they had been performing,
and what with the tax evasion by their former CEO.
But others were strongly against continuing.
They felt it was too risky, and competition from Japanese companies was getting very intense.
But at the same time, RCA’s dealers were
wondering when the hell they would have an
answer to Betamax.
And the competition from
Japan could be seen as a reason FOR the videodisc.
In fact, back in 1974, RCA had done something
that might have secured the success of videodisc.
But it also might have doomed it from the start.
*sigh*
Yep.
I said I didn’t want to do it.
I said I didn’t want to have to do a part five.
Here’s me saying that;
“I don’t wanna have to do a part 5”
Well.
Tune in next time for CED Part 5! Where we look at
RCA’s attempts to convince Japanese manufacturers
to license their CED technology.
RCA had hoped that
they could create the definitive video format
and get ahead of both videotape and any other
disc competition.
But, unbeknownst to RCA,
those efforts would result in a betrayal which
would force them to rush CED to completion
on their own.
We’ll also look at the final
revisions RCA needed to make to make the CED just…
work,
and its performance in the market
after its eventual release.
Thanks for watching, and congratulations on
making it this far!
As always, I’d like to thank everyone supporting the channel on Patreon,
with a special thanks to the fine folks scrolling up your screen.
And also, another warm thanks
goes out to Margaret B. W. Graham for her
work on this amazing book.
Without your efforts
these videos would not be possible.
Thank you for writing it.
Cue the music!
♫ disjointedly smooth jazz ♫
Welcome to the fourth and, perhaps not, final
chapter in the saga that is the…
hue, I forgot
Philips and MCA’s new effort on p pbt pb tpbtpb
[gratuitous lips noises]
Don’t screw up because then you’re gonna make it worse and you’re gonna…
you’re gonna…
you’re gonna think you could maybe get away with that line,
and then you’re
gonna second guess yourself,
and then you really can’t.
So fast tha…
so fast that…
wooh! That’s hard to say.
And people in the labs were like “LA”
--- yeah no, I’m too
[clears throat]
Don’t like that delivery at all!
I mean seriously if you, an enthusiastic
graduate from…
Ehhhh….
And also,
another very warm thanks goes out
to…
this is upside down.
Did you hear about the bus driver that didn't see people waiting at the stop?
Turns out someone forgot to install the latest driver updates.
That was absolutely terrible but I'm not gonna apologize.
