Boom & Bust: the First Videocassette Revolution |
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Home Video was an attractive concept in the late
sixties, for two main reasons. Firstly, the TV
manufacturing companies could see that the boom they were
enjoying in sales of colour TVs must inevitably come to
an end - when everyone had a colour set, the bottom would
drop out of their market. A demand for home video
equipment might come along just in time to keep their
profits bouyant. Secondly, audio records and tapes were phenomenally popular at the time, and the music publishers were raking it in. If they could do the same for video, selling pre-recorded films, concerts and educational programs in some medium as convenient as an LP record - or the new but hugely successful audio cassette - the possibilities were just as mouthwatering. The Japanese manufacturers had made a few attempts at marketing helical scan machines to the public in the mid-sixties, the first being Sony's CV2000 in mid 1965, but their complexity and expense prevented them from making much of an impression on the market.
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The key to the home market was thought to be a machine which would be extremely robust and simple to use - implying a cassette or cartridge of some kind - and which would play directly through an ordinary TV set (unlike professional VTRs which required special monitors). The machines would have to retail for £200 or under [1994: £1200], and the pre-recorded programs would have to be cheap and plentiful. Curiously, most pundits at the time thought that the ability to record TV programs would be of limited interest; a useful extra feature, perhaps, but not the main reason for buying a machine. The expectation was that pre-recorded material would revolutionise the medium in the same way that the paperback book had revolutionised the publishing world.
By 1970, a wave of hype and inflated expectations had gripped America. Electronics companies were buying up publishing houses lock stock and barrel, and every film or book deal included options on the video rights. Pornographic films were particularly sought-after by the speculators, since these could not be shown over the conventional broadcast media. Companies and collaborative projects sprang up everywhere, each claiming that their system - invariably "coming soon" - would be the best and most profitable. Vast fortunes were sunk into the projects, as everyone scrambled aboard the band-wagon. The Video Cassette Revolution was just around the corner, and everyone wanted a piece of the action.
Scanners and Spinners
Of course, the term "video cassette" was new, and didn't necessarily mean the same as it does today. For despite all the advances made since Quadruplex, magnetic video recording was still the preserve of the professional user; a broadcast quality VTR cost over £57000, and even the simplest monochrome reel-to-reel machine was several hundred pounds. Sony were known to be developing a new cassette based system, and there were rumours that this was to be aimed at the home market, but this was not expected to be on sale for several years.
In fact, the most common approach to be tried was TeleCine - scanning pre-recorded cine film and converting it into electronic signals for display on a TV set. Several companies including Kodak had systems based on this approach, but perhaps the most inte resting was EVR, or Electronic Video Recording.
EVR was a collaboration between the chemical
companies ICI and CIBA, the equipment manufacturer
Motorola and the broadcasting giant CBS. EVR was invented
by Peter Goldmark (the man behind the LP record), and
used black-and-white film to hold the luminance signal, as a
normal film frame, with the chrominance signal as
a series of encoded stripes next to this image. EVR player and tape cartridge |
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The pictures were read using the scannning beam of a TV tube, while the sound was stored as a normal magnetic recording. EVR was unique in that complete frames were stored for each 50th of a second (or 60th, for USA & Japan); although no extra information was stored - each frame being constructed by doubling up a single field - this non-interlaced approach made the player much simpler and therefore cheaper. The philosophy was to put all the complexities in the recorder, at the factory, and to keep the actual player as simple as possible. | ![]() |
The main rival to EVR was RCA's SelectaVision. This playback-only system was based on the new technology of holography, reading information from a transparent PVC tape using a laser beam. The signal was not stored as an image, but as an interference pattern formed when two laser beams met at the tape. The system used had the odd property that every spot on the film contained the entire image; even more curiously this meant that the tape speed was unimportant - the image reproduced by the laser beam remained fixed in space regardless of the movement of the tape, and was scanned electronically at the appropriate frame rate. This made the tape transport mechanism much simpler, so despite the state-of-the-art laser technology - SelectaVision wou ld have been the first domestic use of lasers - the player was intended to sell for around $400, as opposed to EVR's hefty $1000 price tag. Perhaps not surprisingly, although SelectaVision was demonstrated in 1969 it never seems to have made it into the shops - unlike EVR.
The only magnetic tape format which is known to have gone on sale was Cartrivision, with machines from Avco and cartridges from the mighty Columbia studio. Its charismatic creator, Frank Stanton, convinced the famous Sears and Roebuck store to stock the £700 players (which were built into TV sets) and their cartridges, with bold predictions of sales of 240,000 units a year. Cartrivision was an odd system by modern standards, since it only recorded every third field - each field being repeated three times on playback - and used a three head drum. The repeated fields must have reduced the picture quality markedly, particularly for fast-moving images, but did mean that a cartridge could record and play for almost two hours.
The third basic approach being considered was video disc. The idea of a "video record" was appealing for two reasons, cost and features. The cost was expected to be lower because a disc can be stamped or pressed in a single operation, whereas any tape or film has to be duplicated serially - playing the master copy through from beginning to end, and re-recording it. A disc can also provide extra features, particularly the ability to jump directly to any part of the recording, in the same way that an audio LP allows you to play any track without having to go through all the previous ones first. A modern CD demonstrates this nicely, with track-skip and random programming.
The accepted wisdom seemed to be that disc would be the better and more successful approach, provided that it could be launched before a tape- or film-based system had gained a significant foothold in the market. Despite this, only one prototype disc format was demonstrated at the time: a basic needle-and-groove system from Germany called TelDec. The flexible TelDec discs used much finer grooves than a standard LP record, but despite this gave just five minutes playback, with monochrome pictures and monophonic sound. Other companies were developing disc formats, but these had not even reached the prototype stage. (For more information on TelDec and video disc, please visit room 9.)
Head Crash
The Video Cassette Revolution of 1970/71 died almost as soon as it was born. In fact, it barely outlasted milk, as the companies realised that low-cost machines were much harder to build than they had thought, or had been told. There was also a fundamental dilemma in the marketing of any new system: no-one was going to buy a machine if there was no material available to play on it, but conversely the film companies had no reason to release cassettes or catridges in a format which few people owned. It was a catch-22 situation.
(The only system to avoid this particular trap was Cartrivision, which had a substantial catalogue of cartridges, but unfortunately these were poorly marketed - Sears and Roebuck stocked them on an entirely different floor to the players - and turned out to be perishable when an entire warehouse-full was found to have disintegrated!)
Vast fortunes were lost - an estimated 80 million dollars in Cartrivision alone - as one by one the backers pulled out. By 1973 it was being described as "The Great Videocassette Fiasco". Many companies pulled out of the market completely, and take no further part in our story, but others were quietly working away in the background, still convinced that the prize was worth the struggle. In 1971, Sony launched their own magnetic cassette format, which they called U-Matic. Although this was apparently aimed partly at the home user, it was marketed initially to professional users, and quickly became the standard for industrial, educational and demonstration purposes, a position it enjoyed for nearly 20 years.
With hindsight, U-Matic was never going to be an appropriate system for Mr & Mrs Average, partly due to the size and complexity of the machinery, but mostly due to the cost - a U-Matic recorder sold for around £735 [1994: £4200], and a separate receiver / monitor costing £450 [£2500] was needed to be able to record TV programs. U-Matic reached the UK in 1973, and is still in use today for industrial and demonstration purposes.
At the time, Sony were claiming that there would be no market for domestic video in the UK until 1978. Not everyone agreed, however, and in the autumn of 1972, the Dutch consumer giant Philips quietly introduced their own magnetic cassette format, called VCR. Like U-Matic, the machines were initially advertised and sold only to professional and industrial users, but by 1974 they were on sale to the general public, and home video was finally a reality. Quiet evenings in front of the telly would never be the same again...
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