The CED: RCA's Very Late, Very Weird Video Gamble (Pt. 1)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 9 ก.ย. 2019
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Bring the magic home… with RCA! Please? We really want you to buy this. Please. Buy it now. Right now. It’ll be great.
Hey! Part 2 is now up and running! Here's a link;
• The CED: No really, it...
If you’d like to learn more about the CED system, you should check out this link:
www.cedmagic.com/home/
Tom Howe’s created a wonderful resource here. It’s a little old, but there are lots of goodies.
How about some other, more different links?
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/ techconnectify
The TC Subreddit
/ technologyconnections
Technology Connections 2 (the channel where I sometimes talk about stuff and generally don’t prepare for anything):
/ @technologyconnextras
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The most nostalgic part was recounting when the Government used to break up giant, monopolistic corporations.
HA! Was that really a thing? Before my time, at least
dont worry, google is the government now
That's at least three decades before my time.
@@deathdeathrevolution3499 Google is god now
When google break up another giant -US- it will be more nostalgic.
CED was my baby. Out of 800 engineers and technicians At RCA Labs, I was the only one who knew how to fix it mechanically and electronically for the first three years of its production.
Share more stuff with us! Stories! :)
I third the request for more stories. This is such an interesting story.
I multiply these requests!
My ex-wife, Heather Helms, worked on this in Princeton one summer. 1979, I think.
fake news
CED disks were my secret weapon as a Rave Video DJ in the 90s. They could be FF and RWDed without any scan lines which made them SCRATCHABLE. With two of them and some vcrs and a video switcher, I could loop video back and forth.
That's so cool.
DUDE as soon as I saw this video i was like 'hmm i wonder if you could scratch these like vinyl'
@@BossDrSample they spin at 450rpm, that would be like scratching a CD
@@user-vm9wv4gj9pme too
DUDE, ITS LIKE, PROTO-YTPs!!
The fact you could get video out of vinyl is truly incredible
@Frederick Revalee I see. Still, my point stands.
@Frederick Revalee Ah thanks for the clarafication
Analog is analog kiddo
Laserdisc managed to combine the best of both worlds in the moment.
Wow! I didn't know much of this history and I was one of the last engineers to leave the project. Myself and Tom Sasena designed the equipment that put digital information in the vertical interval and as needed filled the video portion with data. It was to be used for educational and gaming applications. Dungeons and Dragons was one of our customers. After spending another year at RCA New Products Division in Lancaster, PA where we were going to build a PC with a 2 chip set display processor designed at the Princeton Labs, I decided they weren't serious and went to Bell & Howell Columbia Paramount where I designed video tape loading systems.
Okay THIS is a story that deserves to be told in video form
To bad we didn't have photos or videos of the mastering area.
That's awesome
Sounds like you have had a interesting life, and have worked with/on some interesting projects
By D&D you mean TSR? I'd heard they dabbled in some video stuff. Like in Dragon Strike.
Your video content and production quality rivals any educational TV show I've ever seen. 15-20 years ago to think that this was possible by a single person would have been crazy. Please keep up the amazing content
Hell, he arguably *surpasses* them.
Kids today have it great. When I was in elementary school we relied on filmstrips and slide projectors as media learning tools. It's probably why I'm so boring today 😂
@@stimpy_thecat "BEEP The Radio Corporation of BEEP America was creaBEEPted when..."
@@jonothanthrace1530 that's it! How primitive...
Single person?😂 Dude has a whole team behind him.
Got one of these in the late 80's at the local Goodwill. Paid $5.00. Power supply board was shot. Fixed it, then had to go find the disks. They were plentiful. Eventually, gave the machine away and all the disks. Wish I'd kept the crazy thing. Lol!
Wish you could find amazing stuff like that at Goodwill these days, everything is so picked over by resellers 😢
I love the thought of technology like this where there's just barely enough to have some players and playable content in the right format left over, just enough for enthusiasts, artists, nerds and collectors.
My dad had a video disc player, which he bought with Star Wars.
What convinced him to go with the video disc rather than VHS was the video disc had stereo sound, when VHS did not.
He probably had a laser disc format. I don't think the CED video disc players had stereo sound capability.
I agree with the other commentor with the whacky name -- it was probably LaserDisc.
@@No_True_Scotsman Do you see his nick as "@user-vn8sx8kp4s", because it is strange how I have seen a lot of profile names like that for a while. What is going on?
@@Bruce_Wayne35 yes they definitely did. I'm looking right now at red and black RCA phono jacks on mine.
@@PaladinErik It's just something TH-cam started doing very recently. If you don't choose a nick name, you automatically get assigned one and that's the one they assigned to me.
Little did I know this humble video would reveal the origin of the Flux Capacitor!
Great Scott!
Whoa! That's heavy, Doc.
If a CED Disc is a Flux Capacitor perhaps reconstructed Deloreans to look like from Back to the Future should have CED player where the y shaped flux capacitor is.
A Time Machine with RCA at its Heart❤️~♾~
I think that was a stretch. Normal capacitors are used in electrical circuits, where we describe electrical flow (the movement of electrons) with volts and amps. Flux is a term that describes a magnetic field's magnitude and direction. Electrical transformers convert current in the wires (amps) into flux in the transformer's core (magnetic field). Many time-travel concepts revolve around bending space-time, which could be done with gravitational or maybe magnetic fields. Thus I've always believed the 'flux capacitor' was a device that stored or accumulated a magnetic field, much like an electrical capacitor stores electrical charge.
Flux is also what blacksmiths use to prevent oxidation of the metal. I've seen people use WD40 as a way to get the flux deeper into the grooves of the workpiece, thus better capacitating its functioning. WD40 is a flux capacitator.
Say it with me now: “Character encoding schemes of which Morse Code is one”. Exactly what I was going to say!
"Morse c- oh."
I love the opening music. That is from Isao Tomita’s arrangement of Pictures at an Exhibition done on the Moog synthesizer. A fundamental album for someone getting into electronic music.
I loved it. Was one of my favorites, back when first released, along with Wendy Carlos, and a few others. I was very excited about electronic music.
Now I have a wall of synthesizers, I love to make noise/music with.
Life is good 🎶🎹⚡😻
@@TheScreamingFrog916 Same. I have made the mistake of cheaping out on the keyboard stand and with 3 tiers she's starting to get pretty wobbly. Had to shim the front feet,
@@bcj842 I have started building custom wooden stands and tables, in my garage wood shop, to accommodate my ever expanding synth collection.
Desk/laptop synths are piling up on my couch too, LOL.
Fun hobby, good times :-)
About four or five months ago I was going through a stressful period and I couldn't go to sleep. So I turned on TC and watched video after video to keep my mind occupied and focused on something other than my life. Long story short, listening to Alec explain technology has become my nighttime routine since then, particularly this five-part series. Entertaining but equally soothing. I know. It's weird. But these videos are comforting for me. I decided tonight to join Patreon because it's time I thank him with something other than just views.
And here I was thinking I was the only one
Same here with me Scott. Let's hang on together, I'm sure things will get better for us! Love you guys ♥️
facts
These RCA series is also one of my favorite ones to fall asleep when my mind is restless...
I thought I was the only one too. How bizarre
You have solved a mystery that has bugged me for years. I remember my foster parents having one of these when I was very young, I even remember seeing Back to the Future on it. But I've never met anyone else who had ever heard of or seen this technology. Happy to finally know that I wasn't imagining the whole thing.
It was all a dream and the government made this video to keep you in the dream Like state
It was pretty obscure. My grandparents had this system (grandpa was an AV enthusiast) but I've never yet met anyone else who had or heard of it either, outside the internet at least.
@@unnamedchannel1237 yes, and they keep us in a dream like state so we believe Wyoming actually exists
i was born in 88 and ive never heard of this tech until today, made worse by the fact that i am a tech
@@thesuperpunmaster6369 that's funny. There is this joke that the German city of Bielefeld doesn't exist and it's basically just a government hoax.
I was an engineer at RCA designing integrated circuits in the late 70s through it's demise in the 80's. When I first heard of the CED push, there were some early entry laser disk systems emerging. Most of us knew right away that the CED was doomed to failure. That said, it was a marvel. The original units didn't have freeze frame,. The latter units accomplished this with a little kicker that would bump the stylus back one groove. The stylus alone had a plethora of patents, the biggest one was it's shape. It was similar to a ship's keel and would keep it's area of contact even as it wore down. I'm not sure if this was the reason for RCA's fall, but it sure was a contributer. Some couple other things that contributed were:
* It's wide range of holdings including Banquet Foods and Random House Publishers. Money kept moving around because each of these were cyclic in nature.
* It's foray into mainframe computers. They made an IBM clone that ate up capital and got nowhere.
* Bad management. Notable was Robert Sarnoff who ran RCA after David Sarnoff. The previous two problems came under his watch.
* Bad corporate infrastructure. Everyone talked about the boardroom knock-down drag-outs and the private investigators members hired to get dirt on the others.
RCA owned Banquet? I've heard of diversification but man...
Its - possessive, no apostrophe
It's - contraction for It Is
@@theannoyedmrfloyd3998 Thanks for taking the time to read.
RCA never licensed a patent, until television. Before they butted heads with Philo Farnsworth they would either buy patents outright or would just go ahead and make the thing and dare the inventor to try and fight their deep pockets. Farnsworth was having none of that. Only after RCA's team they'd tasked with making their version work to prove they had electronic TV first produced a system essentially identical to Farnsworth's, and said that was the only way, did RCA for the first time license a patent. But they had dragged it out long enough they didn't have to pay royalties for long. Farnsworth's own television manufacturing company failed and RCA either claimed or strongly implied they were the inventors of television. See farnovision.com
@@greggv8 There were others like Edwin Armstrong that were caught off-guard by David Sarnoff's strong-arm tactics. This was a common theme at the time and the core reason why there is a need have checks on corporate capitalism to prevent runaway greed. We can find the same tactics by the big automobile manufacturers and other industries. Funny how the bad things get lost in the good ones. Without David Sarnoff, there probably wouldn't be public radio or television in the US.
Thank you SO MUCH for making this! I used a CED player as a kid while staying at a lodge deep within the wilds of rural Canada round about 1990, and I thought it was Laserdisc. Nobody I knew owned a Laserdisc player until I realized that the family of a friend of mine were long-time Laserdisc enthusiasts, and I saw them at their house and was very puzzled why they weren't in cartridges. Friends said I must have imagined what I described, even though I have very clear memories of how it operated. But now, I finally know! I was a CED videodisc player!! I didn't imagine it!!
EDIT to add that I also remember the skipping caused by disc damage. My viewing experience (Loony Tunes cartoons, IIRC, but cartoons in any case) was exactly what you showed.
I watched all of my movies on this in my early childhood. I don’t remember any skipping issues. We called them “round rounds.” 😁 I’ve always been confused about why no one else seems to know about them.
I was a rave VJ in the 90's and this system was my Little Secret. At a time when FF and RWD on video tape was blurry and had lines in it the CED was pretty flawless on FF and RWD and on the Still setting. So I was able to loop videos and scratch them like a DJ would with audio vinyl. It was a fantastic system for me at the time. Also most of the titles were Classics so I had a lot of good animated and sci fi titles to choose from
"Those wibbly wobbly wibble wobbles"
I honestly snorted tea out my nose there
I wonder how many takes that took lol
I'm not surprised someone named Nigel was drinking tea and watching videos about outdated media formats.
I take it he's been watching Jay Foreman.
@@CptGreedle again I snorted tea out my nose at that comment
I'm more British than the Queen herself
At least it wasn't timey wimey stuff
Just think...in about 40 years someone will make a video about the quaint old primitive technology known as "4K Bluray".
We'll probably be using holographic data storage by then. Imagine a CD but storing the data in 3 dimensions instead of just 2. We actually already have that capability and have for a while, it just hasn't gone mainstream yet. 15 years ago they held 100 terabytes, just to give you an idea how advanced they were even then. That was considered way too much memory at the time and still is a bit much today.
I think a better analogue for this video would be HDDVD
@@harrylane4 HDDVD died a decade ago. 4K bluray is a failure too, killed off by streaming.
@@meatsafemurderer7743 Streaming is shit though. Convenient sure, but the quality is pretty bad for films.
@@meatsafemurderer7743 As much as I love streaming, but I also hate streaming too. Yes, I have a love-hate relationship with streaming. I love it because I can watch my foreign TV dramas (K-dramas, TV dramas from Europe). I hate it because well not everything I want is on there. For example, one old school Japanese anime, Gatchaman (which I really want to watch) is not available on Netflix or Amazon Prime. And I'm not spending 48 dollars a year for HiDive just so I can watch a old school anime. That's why I'm thankful for blu-ray. Yes, there are other movies and TV shows I can't find on streaming site and that really frustrate me.
I received what I've assumed were laserdiscs of the movie The Lion in Winter (one of my faves) a couple years ago as a gag gift. I never bothered sliding the discs out of the hard plastic sleeves as I don't have a laserdisc player. After watching this video I realized what I have aren't laserdiscs at all--turns out I have The Lion in Winter on vinyl video! What a surprise!
TLIW is about as close you can come to Shakespeare in the modern vernacular! Were they CED's or some other type of video-on-vinyl??!? 😮
I never knew that this technology existed before this video, such a fascinating piece of equipment!
I'm calling BS
@@faizanrana2998 on what??
''why is youtube recommending this to me? I'll just watch a min or two then move on...''
23 mins later, here I am craving for more retro tech history
You're infected. This is your life now.
(It's amazing :D )
Syber-VHS it’s an excellent documentary isn’t it
TH-cam knows you better then you know yourself
@@daveshaw9344 given how much TH-cam I watch, that's kinda scary
Same here
I feel like the high production quality of your content is like a super complex layer of irony that we're not quite ready to comprehend yet.
You mean a super complex joke?
@@gavinisdie jokes can be ironic
Obviously it's cuz he recording on vinyl
It made me smile as you played "Murder by Death", a fantastic movie! I'm glad there are others showing appreciation for this classic.
Bless you for making that U62 reference! I truly feel the world gets just a little better every time someone references UHF.
"I hear Channel 62 is good" I see you too are a fan of UHF
He's a shareholder of U62, no doubt.
Oh I’m a fan for life now.
Well, they do have it all on UHF
I love that you put that opportunity in...
Who isn't?
I thought I'd add a bit of context to this presentation. I was always an early adopter but also poor. Price was a huge part of why people bought these players and disks. At the time, movies, as you pointed out, were selling in the $20 - $30 price range. The same movies on VHS tape were selling for $90 and up. The players were about $530 compared to VHS and Beta decks which were selling in the $900 to $1500 range. So, for the money conscious consumer, it was a better buy for the same picture quality. Add to that, RCA had a HUGE push on to provide a large catalog of content. At one point there was something like 7,000 titles available, including interactive games as well as movies and TV episodes from popular series such as Star Trek. Renting CED disks was about $2 for an overnight rental. RCA also licensed their technology and pushed the players into every major retail store. Sears, JC Penny, Radio Shack, and so forth all sold CED players, often under their own brand names. Were they perfect? No. Not at all. Most of the new disks played well when new. Often with no glitches at all. If not stored properly or mishandled, they quickly deteriorated. But that being said they were a low cost way to enter the "video on demand" world. I later transitioned to LaserDisc because of the improved quality and life of the media but for a poor guy with aspirations of a library of video content of my own, this was a great way to start. I still have a player with autoload and a few of the CED disks around just as a reminder.
Thanks for the great presentation!
That's nastalgia gold dude. I'd love to own one just for the real flux capacitor feature alone. But I digress, if I did own it, would probably be like eh, whateves, lol🚗
Laserdisc doesn't exactly have a long life. They're all in the process of degrading and will be destroyed in an estimated 10-20 years, iirc. This is very unfortunate because laserdisc actually caught on in Japan in a HUGE way, and as such, there are many anime series in danger of becoming (and that already ARE) lost media because they were only printed on laserdisc.
I’ve seen this so many times that I have “Character encoding schemes of which Morse Code is one” memorized down to your exact tone
Thank you for breaking my habit of calling VCR's, VHS Players 😂
The guy in the RCA ad is my grandfather!
Ben Gold Oh! That’s awesome! You look very much like your grandfather! (:
Weird flex.. But ok
Cool!
He's my grandfather too.
He’s my grandpa too.
Hey! I broke out a new microphone / audio setup for this video! I know there's some more work I need to do to isolate the room acoustics from the mic, but I hope you find the audio to be a little clearer and with less noise! Let me know what you think!
It is pretty good and clear, but the reverb needs some work, and the s's are pretty sharp.
IMHO the audio is a straight downgrade.
The aduio is great! In my opinion there is nothing to fix!
Audio is awful on my laptop now :(
Bit echoy and there seems to be a hum, but when that is fixed it will be good. What type of microphone is it?
That intro is so comfy. I’ve never actually seen a CED in person in my life, and yet that startup jingle makes me so nostalgic and at home.
"1904 what rhymes galore" is the reason I subscribed and absolutely love this channel.
General Electric. My favorite wartime general.
Mine was always General Mills
@@nobodys_winds6580 Y'all never heard of my homie General Nutrition.
what about general atomics? come on y'all.
What about the guy from Intelligence? - General Knowledge
@@killerkitten7534 captain crunch is crying in a corner.
My family owned one of these and we actually were able to rent discs from a local store that had a small selection of titles available for a couple years.
Same here. I still have the records; no idea if the player still works (probably not).
@@electrictroy2010 only one way to find out!
Our local Blockbuster rented titles for $2 a night. My father loved new gadgets so he, my brother and I each got a player for Christmas. Dad would also buy discs of titles he liked. We inherited his collection when he passed on. I can't remember a single time when a disc didn't skip or freeze during play back. Eventually all three players broke and we dumped the disc collection at a garage sale.
I had one of these and it came with quite a few discs when I bought it, namely "Star Trek VI The Undiscovered Country", "The Dark Crystal" and "Victor Victoria". It was a different player here in the U.K. but definitely CED, and it was certainly something very different. I do remember that having to turn the disc over during a film was a minor annoyance, but at the time, it seemed pretty cool.
*Star Trek VI* came out in the 90s. How could that be on CED?
@@Attmay So maybe I made a mistake about Star Trek VI. People do make mistakes. Even you I would imagine. It was a long time ago.
This channel has to be one of my most favorites, seriously I’ve spent over 13 years on TH-cam now and this man honestly impresses me the most out of just about anyone else I’ve seen, his style is simply perfect, with a blend of ‘fanciness business like’ in the overall setting and a homey feeling which is simply damn impressive.
Well done keep these videos coming!
the kid is good.
I'm not even halfway through the video and I'm already impressed.
How is that RCA intro feel so nostalgic even though this is the first time I have ever seen it?
I definitely think it was based off of a hymnal that I remember singing in church as a kid
Maia Garbett The music is “Promenade” by Modest Mussorgsky.
It's an amazing song, very regal.
@@travdump209 oh yes!! My dad used to play that on piano!!! That's where I heard it 😆 thank you
Probably just a combination of the picture and sound quality, and the style of intro, which together bring up memories of similar intros from childhood memories.
On a side note, a family friend had a collection of Roadrunner cartoons on video discs back on the early 90s. Fun memories.
I remember WORKING on 1 of those players in 1982! I was amazed st the mere fact that it really DID work at all! But it DID work, in full color, & stereo sound, too!
I'm getting my degree in engineering and I can say it's mindblowing.
Not impossible, but unexpected. I wouldn't have thought of that in 1982 or earlier.
@@nobody8685 engineers have been very smart since the roman times. people forget how smart doctors and engineers were in the 1910s and 20s. doctors and engineers were really really smart in the 60s and 70s too. still the most critical yet underrated invention to modern medicine is the MRI machine which was invented around the 60s and 70s. ive become fascinated by local history and the school i work for is a big time engineering schools. we need smart responsible engineers in the futures, not ones who play cleanup for the big irresponsible corporations. all the best!
Murder by Death is up there with Serial Mom as one of my favourite films. Back in the late 60's my school had a reel-to-reel video tape machine. As well as watching the 1969 moon landing they were able to record it for later use.
I sold those when they came out in 1981. The cartridges were a bit finicky and fragile but the machines themselves were bullet proof. If you find one today, you might find the rubber belts have gone gooey but the cartridge is the item most likely to cause a playback problem. Unfortunately, cartridges are impossible to find nowadays. EDIT: blems in the discs was actually fairly common back when these were new. We had about a 5% exchange rate on new discs, but most discs had an occasional blip here and there. Most customers loved the CED format and understood most discs had occasional blips and didn't complain about a brief playback glitch.
I'd never heard of CED before, so it was absolutely fascinating to get to learn another piece of AV history!
@Maytemberr You probably mean th-cam.com/video/GuCdsyCWmt8/w-d-xo.html
It's not specifically about CED, but it's included.
I used to repair these, along with LaserDisc players.
I remember watching one of these at summer camp in the mid 90's. I thought I had imagined it for the longest time until I saw TechMoan's video on it.
Both excellent videos... beat me to the punch with mentioning the Techmoan one at least
@@kriswingert1662 - I still do....
“...simultaneously a technical marvel and a technical monstrosity”, as was Frankenstein’s monster!
This is why I love this channel: a comprehensive, well-communicated exploration of technological history, telling stories of marvellous human innovations that I had no idea existed. And I lived through the 70s and 80s.
Great job, thanks.
“It’s alive, it’s alive!”
"Ten minutes is dumb."
TH-cam: "I'm being personally attacked!"
getting over 10 minutes is a goal
Why didn’t they just focus on music video? 10 minutes more than enough
@@dmitryberdnikov9130 no it's not
Just started this series. 29 seconds in and you have me with the U.H.F. reference.
Say it with me now!:
"character and coding schemes, of which morse code is one"
You're a goddamn troll, and I love it!
Encoding*
Character encoding scheme
My dad worked at RCA on this tech. We had lots of these videos growing up. I've heard really interesting stories about this including the precision required when creating the records.
I keep coming back to this CED video series, it's honestly maybe my favorite thing on youtube.
I keep pointing people here when CEDs come up in the (very odd) conversation. Then I get sucked right back into watching the whole thing again. It's so well done.
@@mgabrysSF I'm watching it again!
Once I know they used the CED's marketing for the VCR, I think that tells me that they probably saw the writing on the wall. It seems they maybe realized CED may not work out, but they had so much in it that they wanted to launch it and try and recoup some of the investment. It's also possible they saw these as different products with different purposes, where one of them seems made to record something and rewatch it, while the other would presumably present a prepackaged film at higher quality.
Not really - tapes to reproduce were INSANELY expensive. Rental shops paid 90 and over 100 80s dollars per-tape (over 400 today). To rent a movie was 5 bucks a tape. CED cost 20 bucks to buy, 3 bucks to rent (or less). It was a great deal for the time before pre-recorded movies on tape came down and that didn't happen for another 4 years after CED perished. (1988, but really didn't get cheap until the 90s). Tape still required an array of recorders to make the while thing work. While CED just needed to press discs from a plant in Indiana by the score. In fact that's why the VHD CED system in Japan lingered well into the 90s. Cost.
"a mere 17 YEARS later..." I've said it once and I'll say it again, Technology connections is my favorite because you come for the nerd stuff and get treated to comedy gold as a bonus.
I had a CED player, it was better quality than VHS and it was stereo!
I have an SGT-200, the first stereo CED player. It was a while until VCRs came out that beat it for sound quality.
Me too. I had a few discs too. Star wars, torn, mash last episode.
For some reason, the opening is so lovely to me, it gives me goosebumps LOL
I stumbled across your channel during the first lock down in Germany, watched every single video and now they're running in the background to soothe my nerves. Thanks for making weird times bearable
UHF movie reference - check
Anders Enger Jensen Retro Grooves album - check
Review of video player my dad has under his bed at home, quite literally - check
Using Star Trek The Motion Picture for examples - check
I see why this is my favorite channel
knightcrusader you forgot to mention the nonstop whining and complaining 😂
Seems like the CED is a business study in the sunk cost fallacy.
Perhaps but like he said, RCA had decent reasons for trudging on, in the form of much cheaper manufacturing costs of both the player and the record, which was still much cheaper than VHS at the time despite the changes. While VHS may have been inevitable, it still had a few years so RCA could at least cut their R&D losses of it by still selling something for much higher margins than VHS would be. Better to be out $100 million rather than $200 million on the project, or whatever the costs were.
And god knows whether some breakthrough, market or research wise, could have still happened. They accepted the risk, they hedged it against VHS when it came out, the risk went poorly, and yet RCA was still a big name.
"You all laughed at me, you told me to give up, but guess what, I did it. And just in time to get beaten to the punch by LaserDisc, three years earlier."
Hey, I'm learning about fallacies in college.
I would argue there are a lot of technologies like CEDs that had a lot of time invested in them for the sake of being low cost alternatives and they succeeded. Most of the computer industry is like that.
CEDs just got unlucky because they took so long to get working, understandably so, and eventually everything else got cheaper too.
@@JFrameMan I agree that they took to long. I think the other problem was that it was impossible to determine costs because they were unaware that a home video market needed to be invented.
"character encoding schemes of which morse code is one"
bless this channel and its exact right volume of pedantry
My grandparents had a first gen VCR (I think it was a Magnavox top loader, though) and it worked like new until their deaths in the early 2010s. That thing was a beast! I loved the feel of operating it. So delightfully tactile and satisfying! I wonder what happened to that machine... I should ask my mom. 🤔
Calling the VCR's SelectaVision gives me flashbacks to Microsoft Surface being their large scale touch tech before becoming their tablet line.
I remember that as well, Microsoft's product naming this century will still be mocked in 50 years time
Hey, my company bought and loves those Surfaces, they're great for conference calls via Skype
The Surface Pro line is hardly a "tablet"... My Surface Pro 6 is the center piece of my entire audio/visual workstation now...
Eeew, Micro$oft!
*shudders*
I switched to FreeBSD / Devian Linux in 2002, and after a decade, I was finally free of the beast!
Matt Erbst that’s so cool, tell me more about your computer operating system
The weird al "UHF" reference made me smile
I was wondering if that was the reference, glad someone else saw it too 😊
It's the reason television was invented
I was watching this when my internet disconnected *exactly* when you said "and getting stuck..." at 19:07 and I sat there for 20 seconds 100% SURE you were playing a cute trick on us (complete with a very convincing recreation of TH-cam's spinning buffering icon) before I looked back at my router to see it flashing its disconnected signal light. LOL!
I’ve recently found your channel and have been catching up on your videos. I like the references that you use. The one that caught my attention in this on was UHF 62, Wheel Of Fish was one of my favorites
Eureka!!! I grew up watching an RCA CED at my grandparents! My brother inherited it and we always assumed it was a laserdisc player. BTW, all but one of the 60 movies still play extremely well!
We had literally 200 movies on this, watched them up till the late 90s.
Bet it worked well too
@@KeatonsCarlott with a few exceptions, Yes it did! Great quality too.
Imagine a timeline where this came out before VHS and Beta(max), we'd probably see Vinyl Based Video Game Consoles
@@gavinisdie Not possible after the PS1.
@@liyifenn ik
Greetings from the U.K. I like your style and humour, good sir. A very well presented, informative upload. Thank you.
Gen X here. Watched all the way through. I remember having a dinner at my uncles house back in the early 80s for a movie night; it was a big deal to go over and watch a motion picture movie (saw "popeye" with robin williams on channel z and Creature from the Black lagoon in 3D hosted by mistress of the dark all at family gatherings). We saw "Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind" on one of these discs as I remember my uncle having to do the flip over routine and it did snag in play (skip) but only early in the movie and only once. I remember that specifically 'cause all the adults jump on it (the moment) at the time it skipped. Great series. Moving on to part II. thumbs up.
discs - at the time - usually only skipped if stored flat - and even a dust intrusion could be 'unjammed' with a simple fast forward before playing (which we did with rentals as habit). The nice thing about CEDs is we could rent them and transfer them to VHS - which meant we got a large movie library pretty fast with the CED matching the VHS output (at the time before SVHS showed up).
18:11 great scott! a flux capacitor!
Your captions are always amazing. These are wonderful.
I'm not hard of hearing, but even for me the cc improves the experience.
As a non-native speaker, I couldn't agree more!
Absolutely! As a deaf person, I adore his dedication to excellent captions.
I hear great...should I be doing this too?
I feel like I'm missing out.
I was at my local record store and stumbled across the laser disc section; ah memories...
When I hear about old technology being super expensive like $1500 for a VCR I reactively "oof. Who could afford that?"
But then I think about how its not much different than high end new emerging technology today. $1000 for your yearly iPhone, thousands for large ultra high definition TVs, etc
It's pretty weird to think someday future generations will look back and loudly and deeply "OOF" at the idea of spending so much on a big screen you can't even taste 🤦🏾♂️🙄
@@jones6686 I mean it's stupid that anyone even buys expensive TVs to begin with. I can't tell the difference really and when I do, I get a headache because it looks like playdough and too hi def and ultra saturated.
Well, $1500 in the early to mid 80's was around $6000 in today's money, so in fact, it was way more expensive than anything we buy today that is considered to be excessive.
@@lucifer2b666 well, everyone else can tell :/
@@cessnafun5385 what he's mentioning was 1500 bucks after conversion, not before
So to achieve retro perfection I need a DeLorean DMC-12 with an onboard CED playing BTTF. Gotcha.
Thanks to your video series on the CED, I knew what I was looking at when I found one at a yard sale this weekend. Ended up with an SFT100 player and 67 discs for $25. Very cool to own a piece of oft-forgotten video history!
I'm in my 30's as of 2021, but this was how I first saw Star Wars and many other classic films. My grandmother invested in a MASSIVE library of these movies, so we just had it in the house growing up alongside VHS.
3:41 "Actually, before the war, in 1904, what rhymes galore!" LOL
Am I a weirdo for wanting to see more of the CED glitching out? This is some unique glitchiness that I have not seen before, a delicate combination of analog and digital crust.
Agreed, and the color looked warmer on the CED compared to the laserdisc
You could make an avant garde art video out of glitches and snow.
@Trey Stephens When were you thinking about getting CED?
Now or in the early eighties? 😀
I have this unit and also the Laserdisc. However, all the discs were stolen along with 5,000+ vinyl records while I was out on tour for two months. A substantial loss I’ve been trying to replace ever since.
I have a box of unopened Lazerdiscs, I got when my dad passed, and no player.
Interested?
@@TheScreamingFrog916 I collect all kinds of rare stuff like 8 tracks ,lol!
I don’t have a player either but,How much?
Sonny T
I wouldn't worry about trying to recover CEDs. The lube on them is time sensitive. So 4 decades out - it's pretty much a gummy mess. Great for the decade they were 'in' now - not so much (unless you're only talking laserdic - those 'should' still work - unless you're take laser-rot into account (which was and is a thing, with layer separation and noise problems).
Watching this series again for the 20th time, not just because of the content,but because your delivery and style makes for great ambient noise.
wow wait a second
it's like a spinning theremin
neat
didnt realize that
Techmoan did a good version of this as well
Yeah, it hit me once he used the caddy in the player.
Flippin' 'eck
When this showed up on my feed I thought it was a new Techmoan video lol
yes and quite concise though unlike this (maybe) dodnt go into much detail.
And the oddity archive
My aunt used to babysit us as kids and had one of those, I remember going to the store with them to pick out new movies and those covers were massive. The thing worked well, I have fond memories of that machine.
Bird likes your videos. A unique style and enjoyable personality. Great explanations. Stimulating yet relaxing. No obnoxious music. Very nice. Even subjects I know about aren't just rehashed, always a new bit of info to learn. Entertaining.
Your parent's microwave was a bit depressing since I'm reminded we can't get nice stuff anymore.
EDIT: I had that exact RCA cassette machine. Funny, I don't feel old. I still want to know, who is that stranger in the bathroom mirror.
I also had to eplain to my wife how she ruined a new movie cassette putting it on the electric cord.
RCA: "Trust no one. Not even yourself." *insert meme of guy pointing the gun at himself*
0:01 That rendition of Pictures at an Exhibition is a work of beauty.
Interestingly enough, there used to be a store here where I live called Consumers Distributing that rented CED Players and Disks, a year or two before you could rent video tapes. At the time, just average VCR's in Canada cost anywhere from $600 to $1700 dollars. That was a lot of money. When I finally bought a VCR, it was a Sony Beta Hifi (I could get hifi audio + VCR) which was better quality than VHS at the time. It cost me $1700 in 1984 and the tape of Raiders of the Lost Ark they through in sold for $89. Tapes were too expensive to buy for quite awhile after that as well. I was quite happy with renting the CED machine and Disks and don't recall any major issues at the time. I always thought the needle played the video, so I was quite surprised to hear how it actually worked. Great video, thanks.
My son just finished "The Outsiders" book and movie unit with his 7th grade class. I have a distinct memory of watching that movie on Selectavision CED when *I* was in junior high. That intro clip that starts your video takes me WAY back.
I also don't recall these having that bad of skipping/video issues when they were new. Our local library bought into them and rented the players and movies for a few years, and we saw other movies on them at school.
Thanks for showing the "stylus needle" on the RCA. I never knew that!
I get CED's in my thrift shop surprisingly often! Seems some poor saps did buy into the things.
My family did.
My wife remembered this. Her friend’s father actually had one.
My family did and we used them regularly into the early 90s.
I work at a record store and we've had people trying to trade these in surprisingly often lately. After the store's owner looked up what they go for on eBay he wants nothing to do with them anymore though hahaha
@@prufrockrenegade Heh, sounds like a format that bored hipsters would like. Ananchronistically analog and completely pointless, but the media is super-cheap in thrift shops.
DUDE i have been watching this channel for atleast 9 months and i have to say i love this i learn so much about all kinds of old tech i always wondered how it worked, also ur kookie personality and nerdy ways make me feel good about learning, great job brother, cant wait to check out the TECHNOLOGY CONTEXTRAS TOO!!
Weird and far-fetched ideas are the heart of innovation 😊
Excellent video. You've done a lot of research on the topic and it shows. You might want to give your styus a good cleaning. I host an annual CED Videodisc workshop in Indianapolis where we teach how to repair players. You should come some time.
Josh Gibson He'd probably complain the whole time just like he did in the video. I don't think you'd want him there.
There's a big difference between complaining, and constructive criticism. People who complain don't generally produce valid points to back up what they say.
I would love to come! I only have one player now, but used to have several, and have a very impressive collection of discs.
And in mid 70s, there was TED in Germany, 15 mins flexi discs.
Tell us more!
We were thinking the same just at the same time.
I have written a comment (see above) with some additional information on TED.
Oh dear, now you've escalated the EBay bidding war between TC and Techmoan over obsolete technology.
@@Markle2k Twice now I have very-quickly listed obsolete tech on eBay to capitalize on the nostalgia-fever sparked by videos those two have released! My laserdisc player went pretty quickly.
Yes. Watch the demonstration by the Databits channel here on youtube.
Very wholesome content. This reminds me of something I could catch on TV when I was younger.
0:25 Stanley Spadowski's Clubhouse is good on 62
I remember RCA using 'SelectaVision' branding on their VCRs too. I still remember the tagline "It's not just television, it's SelectaVision!"
6:38
"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."
_immediate like_
Reminded me of Dr. Who describing time travel.
I'm still amazed at how good those wibbldy wobbly wibble wobbles sound
Making a Weird Al reference right off the bat. You know the way into my heart 💛
One of my engineering college classmates worked on the RCA development team for the CED player. I haven't seen him in 40 years. If I ever catch up with him, I hope he can enlighten me.
16:39 Discs themselves are gorgeous. Laserdisc, too.
That RCA intro is burned into my memory. I used to love my SelectAvision when I was really young.
Ultimately, the failure was not RCA, but the companies releasing the movies.
Back in that era, the companies releasing the movies were trying to maximize profits by releasing them at a high cost. A typical video actually cost around $90 in 1981, that is almost $300 in today's money. That is why few actually "owned" company made videos, and either rented them from the booming rental market, recorded their own, or copied them. It was not until around 1992 that the industry realized they could make more money by sharply reducing the price and making up for it in volume. If they had done that a decade earlier at least on that format, the demand would have been much higher. But by that time, both CED and LD had been killed as those were play only formats, and few were buying premade movies.
Fast forward another decade, and DVD did work as a play only format because the industry was smart and sold them at a price the consumers could afford to pay. But if they had never done that and was still trying to sell new pre-recorded movies in the $200-300 range, then DVD would have died also. Because there is simply no market for a play only format where the media is that expensive.
VHS movies were like 19.95 to 24.95, new, in the 90s.
@@jbrady1725 And they were more like $50-100 new in 1980. In 1982 when Star Wars was first released it was $80. You are talking about the prices about a decade and a half later, when they finally realized they could make more in selling them in bulk than at a high price for each one.
I bought two new CED players back in the early 80's, and I can tell you that even brand new discs had the same playback problem, newly un-shrink wrapped. I had bought an RCA SelectaVision VET-650 VHS VCR new as well ($1,500). I also adopted the LaserDisc format, but not until 1984. For the 'record,' the VHD VideoDisc format, created by JVC (and released only in Japan) was another capacitance format that was superior to RCA's CED format. In fact most of my VHD discs still play fine.
I wish I was around 1984