How Storing Movies on Vinyl Lost RCA $650 Million

Hey! I recognize this voice. It's the guy that always loses Jet Lag: The Game.

Oh no we're going to Technology Connections territory

TechnologyConnections' five part trilogy on this format is peak YouTube, and an excellent documentation of his descent into madness over RCA's increasingly baffling decisions.

Technology connections also taught us that the sideways track encoded channel bias, not a separate channel.

finally, an audience that appreciated the magic of buying two of them

I'm honestly not surprised there's a massive overlap in the Technology Connections and HAI audiences lmao

1:51 The record says "33 1/2", but the standard speed is 33 1/3. I hope someone got fired for THAT blunder.

6:51 Another advantage VHS tapes had over CEDs: consumers could record their own video onto them. In fact, early VCRs were marketed as video recorders first (for recording TV shows), and the fact they could also play pre-recorded tapes was a neat bonus.

I literally just finished rewatching Technology Connections' series on the CED. It's some really fascinating stuff

Error in the “Smokey and the Bandit III” joke. It was THE BANDIT that wasn’t in the movie (actually he does make an appearance at the end). The movie is actually all about Smokey taking the challenge while Snowman tries to thwart him.

They didn’t wobble up and down, the wiggled side to side. And when stereo was introduced the two waves were cut 45° off. The problem is up and down doesn’t provide good resolution because the needle has to fall, and it can only fall as fast as gravity allows it to. This means every fall of a wave would be distorted. (This was learned via Technology Connections.)

To put "didnt work and wasnt marketable" in context, I lived through that time period, and saw, what I thought, was every innovation hit someone's parent's house, and NEVER did I ever hear about or see this admittedly awesome piece of technology.

I dimly remember these in department stores when I was a kid in the early 80s. I think they did serve one useful purpose for retailers, which was to lure people into the color TV showroom. There was still some novelty to seeing a movie on a television screen and knowing it was coming from the disc in the machine, rather than being broadcast from the local TV station. I can imagine the store manager saying "we're never going to sell any of this crap, but it's here, so we might as well play the discs until they're unusable."

Though it wasn't the only factor, this was one of the contributing things that killed RCA. It is remarkable how RCA used to be one of the biggest consumer electronics companies, now barely anyone remembers them. Only the name lives on, only as something for Chinese OEMs to license for their generic microwaves or ACs.

My late parents owned two players and about 100-150 movies. Couple of corrections. One- If the movie was longer then 60 minutes, they offered it on two disks. I remember my parents having Gandi on two discs, for example. Also, the CED disc quality was better then VHS/Beta. What really killed CED was the inability to record TV/Movies and a limited selection of films.

Feels like a Technology Connections video haha (I think he did a video on it?), He also explained why 2:38 is wrong, you actually don't do purely up/down and left/right, you rotate them for compatibility.

2:35 minor correction It is not true that "back and forth creates one sound wave and up and down creates a different one", because the bandwidth of those two channels is not the same. The side-to-side wiggling is much more constrained than the up-and-down wiggling, and so if you did it that way, the audio quality on one channel would be much worse than the other To get around this, the way phonographs work is that the two channel pickups are at 45 degrees to the horizontal, and still perpendicular to each other. So one channel will be like up-right/down-left and the other will be up-left/down-right. This way, the limitation of the side-to-side wiggling is shared between both channels

Someone was watching Technology Connections.

Hey this isn't the christmas light guy!

Edit: Dear God I needed that. 'Hey didn't technology connec-' Then this line of 'hey technology connections did a five part series on this.' thanks guys that helped. In fairness the technology could have been commercially viable and useful if it had released a few years sooner. As is? by the time it released better had already hit the market and so there was no incentive to ever try improving the players, mastering techniques, disc materials, or any of it. Technology Connections did a really nice multi-part deep dive into Disco/Selectravision/CED technology.