60 years of CED: How picture plates ruined a global corporation
In the streaming age, many users question the point of physical entertainment media. But that was not the reason for the spectacular RCA bankruptcy.
Symbolic image: Data carrier over time.
(Image: Aleksei Ignatov; Shutterstock.com)
Television in the early 1960s: In the pioneering country of electronic moving image entertainment, the United Kingdom, the BBC broadcasts two TV programs, the private ITV one. In the USA, there were three nationwide broadcasting chains; in Germany, which was still divided at the time, there was Deutsche Fernsehfunk (DFF, later DDR 1) in the East and ARD and ZDF in the West. The TV offering was meagre, with the stations only broadcasting a few hours a day. Above all, if you missed an episode of your favorite series, you were out of luck.
Video recorders for recording on tape are already available at –, but the few devices for normal consumers are bulky, complicated and expensive. On the audio side, on the other hand, vinyl records have established themselves as a medium with a usable sound that can be produced quickly and cheaply with an acceptable playing time. So it's obvious: if you want to offer the rapidly growing number of TV set owners an alternative to the television program, some kind of disc for the program would be ideal.
More variety on television!
That's what the then powerful Radio Corporation of America, or RCA for short, thought at the beginning of the 1960s. For decades, it dominated the radio business – practically everything to do with radio was covered by RCA patents. After the Second World War, the company was successful with the NTSC color TV system –, which was ingenious despite its weaknesses, and the picture tubes required for it.
Video disks are set to become the next big business, because it is clear that the current RCA patents will expire at some point and you always have to expect that the competition will find legal ways to circumvent your own technologies.
So – no joke: Project Discpix. Unfortunately, RCA faces the same problem as all the other electronics companies and tinkerers pondering video media. In order to reproduce an audio signal sufficiently cleanly, it is sufficient for the technology to handle a frequency range of up to 20,000 hertz (vibrations per second, Hz). For video, on the other hand, – mind you, SD resolution – it should be at least 3,000,000 Hz or 3 megahertz (MHz), for TV quality better 5. So roughly at least 150 times the storage capacity is needed.
The British TV developer John Logie Baird conceived the first, primitive approaches with his Phonovision in the 1920s – but did not pursue the approach any further. Baird's system works just as mechanically as audio records and manages just four frames per second, which is far too little for even a halfway fluid display of movement. The level of detail, i.e. resolution, of the images preserved with such a system would not have met even the simplest requirements. If you want to offer the rapidly growing number of TV set owners an alternative to live television, some kind of program disc would be ideal.
The simple solution: film as film
In 1952, French engineer Pierre Toulon, who worked for Westinghouse, came up with the idea of simply arranging the individual frames of a filmstrip on a disk. For the TV systems and display sizes available at the time, the individual images did not have to be as large as the 35-millimeter cinema film – they were only 1.5 millimeters wide. A film scanner, i.e. a kind of electronic camera, creates the signals suitable for TV screens from the individual images.
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The Westinghouse idea, incomprehensibly called the "Frequency Adjustment System", did not go beyond prototypes. Nevertheless, it was so obvious and tempting for prerecorded media that a consortium consisting of Motorola, CBS and the chemical companies ICI and CIBA took it up in 1964. The system was marketed from 1969 as EVR – Electronic Video Recording – although the system could not record anything. Instead of a disk, there were closed film reels, which the "recorder" first opened and threaded into the device. One reel can hold 2 x 25 minutes of entertainment in black and white or 25 minutes in color – instead of the second black and white program, in this case the color signal for the picture is on the second film track. However, even with color programs, the actual film is always B/W material, which is available at a reasonable price. Nevertheless, this format was not sufficient for a feature film in one piece – and even black-and-white film was significantly more expensive than the PVC of a record at the time.
A picture plate was needed!
Because of all these weaknesses, RCA opted for a disc as the carrier medium. In October 1964, exactly 60 years ago, RCA announced its plan and rolled up its sleeves. Work began on what would end up as the Capacitance Electronic Disc (CED) and become one of the company's nails in the coffin.
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RCA took until 1981 to launch –, by which time its competitors had also come up with similar ideas, but usually implemented them better. AEG-Telefunken is faster than RCA. As early as 1970, the Hanover-based company, together with the record companies Teldec and Decca, presented the first samples of the "TElevision Disc" (TED). The only player, costing around 1500 Deutschmarks (approx. 2535 euros), appeared on the market in 1975. The discs are scanned mechanically – only that the TED uses in-depth writing instead of the side writing of audio records.
(Image:Â Telefunken)
The signal is therefore encoded in the stroke that the disc transmits to a scanning needle. The thin disc foils are inserted into the playback device together with the paper sleeve. One side has a playing time of only ten minutes, and despite the sleeve, the discs are sensitive. So Telefunken had developed a functioning technology long before RCA, but it only offered insufficient playing time. And so, after two years, the player and disks were quietly stamped out.
