The video cassette tape was really the first successful home video format; discs just couldn’t compete back in the early days. That’s not to say nobody tried, however, with RCA’s VideoDisc a valiant effort that ultimately fell flat on its face. However, the forgotten format did have one benefit, in that it led to the development of an entirely new kind of microscope, as explained by IEEE Spectrum.
The full story is well worth the read; the short version is that it all comes down to capacitance. RCA’s VideoDisc format was unique in that it didn’t use reflective surfaces or magnetic states to represent data. Instead, the data was effectively stored as capacitance changes. As a conductive stylus rode through an undulating groove in a carbon-impregnated PVC disc, the capacitance between the stylus and the disc changed. This capacitance was effectively placed into a resonant circuit, where it would alter the frequency over time, delivering an FM signal that could be decoded into video and audio by the VideoDisc player.
The VideoDisc had a capacitance sensor that could detect such fine changes in capacitance, that it led to the development of the Scanning Capacitance Microscope (SCM). The same techniques used to read and inspect VideoDiscs for quality control could be put to good use in the field of semiconductors. The sensors were able to be used to detect tiny changes in capacitance from dopants in a semiconductor sample, and the SCM soon became an important tool in the industry.
It’s perhaps a more inspiring discovery than when cheeky troublemakers figured out you could use BluRay diodes to pop balloons. Still fun, though. An advertisement for the RCA VideoDisc is your video after the break.
I still have hundreds of these discs and several of the players. (as well as LaserDisc and Betamax players and media, too)
There is always the Catch-22 that for software production to be profitable, there needs to be sufficient number of owners of the hardware. But, for people to invest in the hardware, there needs to be sufficient software.
So, acceptance by early adopters are necessary for a system to get over that early hump.
The largest group of early adopters of videotapes were looking for porn. Cheap to produce, it didn’t take long for sufficient quantities of porn tapes to flood the market. Since even pervs like regular movies, that made it profitable for main stream films to be released.
But, because the video disc recording process was proprietary, they weren’t conducive for home made content. So, there was no available porn. And, not enough hardware penetration.
A friend of mine went absolutely bonkers for these around 2000. They were great quality and oddly abundant at garage sales in Minnesota.
My favorite part of this format is that you stick in the sleeve, then pull it back out to either drop off or pick up the disk inside the player. Good coverage of this format on the Technology Connections channel.
The only time in my life I ever responded to a job ad from an agency was for a technician for some undefined development that RCA was doing, my roommate insisted I check it out. It would have been 60mi away and this is what they were doing. At that time I worked at Essex wire which was featured here for it’s SX200 but was running it’s self into a mess and then they sent all the work down to Mexico. I’ve had only one job since then.
Some things come along and I say what a joke and lets bypass this thing for what will fail quickly. This and mini disc goes up there with 8 tracks and DAT. Carbon in the plastic and wear on the stylus, really good design.
“8 tracks” – for a failed format, I was sure finding a lot of those tapes well into the 2010s while thrift shopping. I’ve seen far more 8 track tapes than Betamax ‘in the wild’. I’m just wondering if the ragging on 8 tracks is an extension of ragging on the 1970s in general, brought about by popular (mis)conceptions of that decade from the media.
8 track was by no means a failed format. Every format that is now obsolete is not automatically a “failure.” Time and technology march on.
Advertising expenditure overtakes the quality of the format. I recall the demise of 3″ Floppy disks drives (FDD) from Hitachi compared to the 3.5″ Sony FDD.
I remember Laser Disc, while the only time I ever saw it in action was when my elementary school brought one in for us to watch science videos on, I was absolutely in awe of it and just knew that I was looking at the future with it.
Ha ha, I still got a working model with at least 50 movies!! War Games anyone?
The capacitive video disc and the somewhat more popular optical video disc had the problem that they encoded their image data in NTSC or PAL format thus putting a fairly low upper bound on the picture quality. Though better, video discs were not perceived as materially better than tapes by consumers. Discs were passed over because they required purchasing an additional large device and storing the large discs. The discs were also a playback only medium. Consumers stuck with tapes which they felt were less expensive and good enough.
When DVDs arrived, the digital storage uncoupled from a specific broadcast format allowed playback devices and televisions which were beginning to rapidly improve image quality to take advantage of the higher DVD resolution. DVDs were rapidly accepted by consumers. DVDs also offered both playback and recording. Blu-ray which followed DVDs was not as widely accepted even though more storage and higher resolution is available. Again consumers did not find the new medium materially better. It is the same issue that hindered the original video discs. Blu-ray requires buying an additional device and improved video quality I was by the limitations of video display devices commonly in use when the format was introduced.