The $580 Million Vinyl Movie Disaster (Selectavision)
THIS is a movie. And this is a movie. And this isn’t just a movie – it was a catastrophic revolution in home entertainment that brought down one of the 20th century’s biggest tech empires. It weighs nearly a pound and a half, and it’s even larger than a LaserDisc – it’s actually a 12 ⅝” x 13 ⅞” plastic housing containing a Capacitance Electronic Disc that pushed the basic concept of the phonograph to its audio-visual limits, all to turn your shag mustard-colored living room into a movie theater. It took some filthy milk crates, the patience of a Tibetan lama, and a serendipitous technology connection to understand what this thing was – and how to actually get it to work. It was a fascinating and ambitious idea so good that the only possible outcome was… a total disaster that splattered the blood and fur of a cute terrier mix named Nipper on the semi-truck grill of technological progress. I was flipping through the February 1984 issue of Popular Science when I found an article on “Video Teachers” – and that one article took me to a 1977 cover story, RCA R&D in 1964, and then, weirdly, back to the future. William J. Hawkins was reporting on new RCA interactive
videodisc players that could do more than just let you own and watch movies at home. It could be an on-demand video teacher, but you could also play Full Motion Video games. It was called the “Selectavision 400.” I’d never even heard of the Selectavision 100, and I was an 80’s kid whose dad co-owned a video rental store. My adolescent brain was baptized by VHS tapes and molded like
clay in the hands of hundreds of viewings of The Goonies, The Neverending Story, and Adventures in Babysitting – and it was permanently scarred by the cover for The Blob. I usually only get a piece of tech when I know exactly what it is – but I grabbed a refurbished RCA SJT-400 off eBay kind of on a whim. All I had were those Popular Science articles. Hawkins described the device's ability to provide quizzes at the end of a videodisc lesson to test your knowledge. “A Walk Through the Universe” is an interactive exploration of astronomy and the cosmos, which… seems awesome.
And that was my first problem with the Selectavision. I searched the depths of eBay for a copy that could arrive at the same time as my player – and I got nothing, not even past auctions in the sold listings. Why? Because the title featured in the article, “A Walk Through the Universe,” was never released to the public.
CED Magic is an exhaustive and comprehensive website detailing all-things-Selectavision, including a breakdown of all the interactive releases. The page dedicated to “A Walk Through the Universe” explains how it was only distributed to libraries and educational institutions – it was never available for retail sale. So Popular Science was evangelizing the dawn of interactive educational videodiscs and highlighting the promise of strolling through the universe from your couch – just as RCA was breaking its promises. What’s going on here? Hawkins did mention three other interactive discs, a horse-betting game and two murder mysteries. So,
I got all three to play at the dinner parties I don’t have. There are lots of goofy relics of antiquated technology – but that 1977 cover story made it clear that the Selectavision was a revolutionary piece of Star Trek futurism. “Here At Last: Video-Disc Players.” Now we have an endless supply of cheap, on-demand content in our pockets and living rooms – but in the 1970s, the only real mass media you could own was music. It had been nearly 100 years since the first phonograph put audio in your hands,
and the proliferation of vinyl records established real ownership of sound. You could buy any song or album you wanted, and you could play it at home whenever you wanted. 8-tracks came along and cassette tapes and walkmans were about to make it all portable. But video? The only way to see a movie was at the theater, or chopped up into commercially-separated segments on whatever television stations were playing fixed-time-slotted programming on a handful of channels. Did ya miss the latest episode of The Incredible Hulk with Lou Ferrigno? Too bad! Did you eat Grandma Gertrude’s dodgy oyster dip to be polite? Great, well that one time Star Wars actually came on, you spent the Mos Eisley cantina scene and the Death Star explosion in the bathroom.
John Free’s article about RCA and Phillips/MCA videodisc players described a future where viewers could control what they watched and when. He’d seen RCA’s Selectavision – which was physically massive – with discs that could hold 30 minutes of video on each side. They didn’t have a caddy yet, so they required extremely delicate handling. He wrote, “Pictures I’ve seen at several demonstrations were excellent.” The keys to entertainment were about to be handed over to consumers. He said,
“Both the RCA and Philips/MCA players will appear in stores just when new home video-cassette recorders, video games, and pay-cable programming are teaching viewers that their TV receivers can easily display something other than fixed-time broadcast fare.” He was absolutely right, and so was RCA – about 40 years too soon. Anyone reading this cover story would’ve expected the units to be on shelves. The article actually indicates availability later that year. It was… not available later that year. Or the next year, when the LaserDisc launched with Jaws. Or for the rest of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. Even in 1980, the three things on
ice were the Cold War, a hockey miracle, and the rollout of the Selectavision. The Selectavision took four more years to hit shelves. And that was a problem. But the idea was fantastic. Everyone loved collecting vinyl records and curating realtime audio expressions of their identities. Why wouldn’t they want to do the same thing with movies they loved that were basically vinyl records? If you’re RCA, there’s no reason NOT to think this wouldn’t be a billion dollar industry. And
they actually projected that by 1990 their annual videodisc-related revenue would be $7.5 billion. That… did not happen. Let’s get back to my Selectavision, BECAUSE IT’S BROKEN. When I unboxed it, it had a warning label that said “REMOVE BOTH RED SCREWS BEFORE USE” that was stuck on with painter’s tape. Okay. I asked the guy who sold it to me what
was up with the screws – and he explained that, “They were there to lock the pickup sled in the home position so it couldn't move, and possibly break some fragile plastic gears. Originally, there would have been a pair of plastic "shipping tabs." Extreme fragility and delicate technology go together like the chicken and jell-o in a silhouette salad, so we’re off to a good start! I turned it on and popped the plastic cassette in, and… it spit it right back out at me. That seemed really weird to me – I figured I’d just put it in like a VHS tape and it would stay in there. I pulled it back out and instantly heard this horrendous banging sound. These discs are not like VHS tapes – they called the cartridge a “caddy,” and it's just a protective housing for the disc inside. It’s not integrated into the unit
the way a floppy disk is. And this makes perfect sense, because the disc can’t be totally covered by a plastic shell when it needs to be read with a physical stylus like a record player. But mine was about to explode and I had to defuse this bomb. I went to hit the eject button, and… there is no eject button. There is a REJECT button,
which is strangely poetic. Now it’s telling me to put the shell BACK into the machine so it can suck the disc back into it. And with that I can finally shut it off. Okay, so I messaged the seller to let him know that, uhhh, this thing sounds broken. He said it’s happened to him before when shipping Selectavisions, and that I need a one sixteenth inch allen wrench to adjust the player height – that’s what’s causing the knocking. He even linked me to a video showing me how to fix it, which was awesome.
The video is literally a guy with a Selectavision propped up on Powerade bottles… because the adjustment hole is ON THE BOTTOM OF THE UNIT. It’s inaccessible if it’s on a table, and you really need to be playing a disc while you make the platter height adjustment so you know how much to turn the bolt. So this is kind of a pain, but whatever – I’ve got a folding hex key set. And… the
smallest is five sixty-fourths. This set stops one sixty-fourth of an inch short of the size I need. OF COURSE. My dad saved me an Amazon order by having a kit with a one sixteenth, and he had a couple dirty old milk crates I could use to balance the Selectavision on while I adjusted it. After a few quarter turns the knocking sound was gone and I was successfully spinning “48 Hours” with Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte. But that’s a movie – not an interactive game. One of the things that fascinated
the Popular Science writer was the 400’s revolutionary way to control viewing and interactivity with the Digital Command Center Remote – so I needed to fire this up. RCA spent nearly a quarter of its entire history getting to its complex series of buttons – and what’s inside the videodisc caddy itself is so complex that I had to call in YouTube’s leading expert on the Selectavision to explain to me how it actually works. But before that we need to know who we’re dealing with. The Radio Corporation of America was founded in 1919 – it dominated radio communications. They created the National Broadcasting Company NBC in 1926, and purchased the Victor Talking Machine Company 3 years later – that’s how Nipper got to be the most recognizable dog of the 20th century. They helped pioneer the television industry, and in 1954 they launched the first consumer color television.
So yeah. RCA was huge. They’d always been at the forefront of media technology, and after the color TV they were looking to develop the next big thing. Why wouldn’t they go from democratizing audio to democratizing video? The problem was… well, there were a lot of problems. When RCA got the idea for a videodisc in 1964, the physical format of it made a lot of sense. Yeah, what they developed is extremely sensitive to dust, humidity, scratches, and fingerprints in a way that incredibly sturdy vinyl records aren’t, but that’s ok – you can imprison it in a protective caddy. But it turned out even
with that layer of insulation, the discs still deteriorated – and that led to permanent skipping that could never be cleaned. Never. Because trying to clean it would just make it worse. Why? How did any of this even work? Hi, Kevin. The plastic caddies held what they called Capacitance Electronic Discs. The concept isn’t much different from vinyl records but it took years to figure out how to store 200 times as much information as a long-playing record on a similar disc. The players spun an 11.8-inch disc at 450 revolutions per minute, 13 times faster than a record player. The conductive carbon-loaded PVC discs held high-density spiral grooves measuring 1/10,000th of an inch on each side read by a keel-shaped diamond stylus. As it’s reading the discs, an electronic circuit is formed that contains four frames of video with each rotation of the disc. Which is why when you hit pause the screen just goes black. It can’t freeze-frame on four
frames at once. Each side of the disc held 60 minutes of information so any movies over 120 minutes required a second video disc. Uhh, hope this helps! Good luck and happy VideoDisc-ing. Okay. It’s ironic that by pushing the technology of vinyl records to their absolute limit, they turned one of the most reliable chunks of media in tech history into one of the most fragile things ever created.
RCA put 17 years of development into the Selectavision between its conception and release. Everyone increasingly wanted everything at home. A kitchen with the same appliances restaurants had, a swimming pool in the backyard – what wouldn’t you want at home? And why not your own movie theater where you decided what would be on the screen? RCA Chairman Edgar Griffiths said that RCA was committed to VideoDisc not just for this generation, but for the next and the next. Audio media hadn’t changed substantially in 50 years – why wouldn’t video follow the same trajectory? RCA launched the videodisc with $20 million of marketing in its first year, including an hour-long presentation hosted by legendary NBC news journalist Tom Brokaw. It even had its own song, “We’re Stayin’ In Tonight!” performed by people who marched out of a giant RCA television to dance on top of a humongous Selectavision – look at this! “We’re all through sayin’ Hey, what else is playin? Or what time’s the game or fight? We can stay right home and see it all Night after night! We won’t have to stand in line We’re stayin’ in tonight! You play your disc I’ll play mine We’re stayin’ in tonight!” Yeah nothing could hype me up more to play an interactive who-dun-it style full motion video murder mystery game scratched off a piece of plastic and magically projected into my TV. It looks like, mama, I’m stayin’ in tonight! VidMax claimed that “Murder, Anyone?” was the first interactive game of its kind. And being able to show you that was its own tech labyrinth. To both play the game and record the footage, I needed to use the Selectavision’s bizarre remote while also getting the footage to my laptop. I got an analog to digital video capture card,
then a USB 2.0 to USB-C adapter for the laptop. I connected everything to a video/audio splitter that I use to hook up retro video game consoles and it didn’t work. The splitter had 5 inputs, but only 1 output, and I needed to output both the TV and the laptop. I found a 1-input, 4-output splitter on Amazon and now for the first time in YouTube history we can see “Murder, Anyone?”, “A Week at the Races” and "Many Roads to Murder.”
I threw in Murder, Anyone? and got the CRT surprise of my life. Three years before she went Back to the Future, and four years before she rocked out with Howard the Duck, Lea Thompson made her acting debut as distant cousin Sissy Loper in this forgotten videodisc murder mystery game. And private investigator Stew Cavanaugh was played by Paul Gleason, who three years later would be immortalized in 1980s cinematic lore as Bender’s nemesis in The Breakfast Club. There are 16 murder mysteries you can choose to play at any time in any order. Here’s how you do that – which is so intricate that it should be in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons handbook you should’ve been playing instead of this.
On your Digital Command Center Remote, press “Program” and then “Band” to bring up a 10-slot numerical program band. The instructions include a menu of all 16 stories and their respective Program Band codes. So if you want to play “Death Strikes at Nine,” you input 03, 06, 10, 17, and 22, and then press the “SEEK” button. This tells the Selectavision to skip around
the disc to those respective sections and present the scenes required to watch that specific story. So, you watch the story, and that’s the end of Side 1. When you’re ready to solve the case, you have to eject the disc and flip it over to Side 2, which is the Investigation File. Then you enter the Band number not the Program Band number to get to your story and then call up clues by searching Pages on the disc. Here, the directory gives you PAGE number information for the location of everything you need to solve the murder. This includes interviews with all
the suspects, which are NOT VIDEO INTERVIEWS – they’re text with a single question and answer. And there’s no background music or sound of any kind. Just dead silence. Then, you just pull up a list of clues like a blackmail note from the butler, or a telephone record with the times a call was made. And after you view each clue you have to go back to the proper BAND number and start that process all over again. If you’re stuck, you can access DESPERATION slides that reveal the most pertinent clues. To solve the case you run through the Murderer, Motive, and Method lists, which each have number values. The murder is two numbers, the motive and method are one number each. To input the
accusation you hit the Page button and enter your Accusation Index, which is the two numbers of the Murderer, the number for the Motive and the Method combined into a two number pair, and then 00. If your accusation is wrong, the screen says, “Incorrect! Lose a turn!” and if it’s right it says, “Correct! You win!” If you’re hosting a party and everyone’s playing this game, you literally have to choose someone to NOT have fun. The inputs are so frequent and complex that someone has to be designated to pay close attention all the time so they can respond with the right input, or else your Uncle Frankie guzzles his 4th martini as he’s waiting and your boss who you never should’ve invited in the first place is so bored he’s thinking about your replacement. It’s like deciding
on a designated driver, but it’s a designated remote jockey. Why wouldn’t you just play Clue? Because this is the cutting edge interactive movie game technology of 1982. Was it fun then? I have no idea. I wasn’t born. But it’s ambitious and totally different from the best of electronic entertainment in the era – you were interacting, sort of, with legit Hollywood actors in a sophisticated way compared to trying to get Q*Bert down a pyramid. The market at the time disagreed – it decided that blasting Space Invaders on an Atari 2600 was a lot more fun.
“Many Roads to Murder” is the thrilling sequel to “Murder, Anyone?” in which Paul Gleason returns as Stew Cavanaugh – but Lea Thompson had already moved on to Jaws 3-D, a youth guerilla war against the Soviets, and a misguided attempt to seduce her own son. And if you loved how RCA bet it all on the Selectavision, you could wager your entire fake retirement account on a horse named Whippersnap. “A Week at the Races” was a horse gambling game hosted by Willie Shoemaker – he won 11 triple crown races in his career and is one of the greatest jockeys of all time. You had the play money and numbered plastic pieces to place your bets. You pick a horse, watch the race,
and see who wins and who places – and, strangely, not who shows. The back of the caddy claims it offers unlimited fun, but with 48 pre-recorded races it seems like it offered 48… fun. Can you imagine the fights that would break out from someone accusing another person of already having seen the race? The hosts could never play, they already knew the result. And how many times could you invite the same guest over to play fake interactive horse racing? The instructions even mention that you need to keep a log of the races you’ve already watched and the murders you’ve already solved to avoid repeats… which you’d better not lose. The thing is… the Selectavision revolution was dead before those horses even broke out of the starting gate. Margaret B. W. Graham spent nearly 10 years writing the definitive account of
the Selectavision for her book “Business of Research: RCA and the VideoDisc.” It actually started as an applied history project at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration in 1976 – 5 years before the Selectavision was even out. She explains that RCA was coming off a generation of trying to find the successor to the color TV, including 1971’s $250 million failed attempt at getting into the mainframe computer business.
They were desperately trying to return to their former glory as a systems innovator. And they saw video discs as an affordable, mass market way to bring movies into the world’s living rooms. The players cost $499, which is $1,800 today, and each disc cost between $14.98 and $24.98 – which would be $54 to $90 now. VCRs existed, but they were for rich people – they were twice as expensive and VHS tapes were almost four times as much as video discs. VHS movies could be up to $90 – adjusted for inflation, it was nearly $300 to own a copy of Bedknobs & Broomsticks.
RCA was already selling VCRs for high-end users… THAT WERE ALSO CALLED SELECTAVISION. So you’d go into an RCA dealer to ask for a Selectavision, and they’d have a ridiculous conversation with you about whether you wanted the disc thing or the tape thing and answer 42 questions about each one. RCA dealers hated this. And that wasn’t even the major problem. They misjudged whether consumers wanted to own movies at all. The real videophiles did, and they actually bought way more movies than RCA
expected them to. They launched with a massive library of 100 titles and estimated that a home would average 8. The real number was upwards of thirty – but they only sold 550,000 players, so they couldn’t justify continued investment in the one aspect they were crushing it with. The question they didn’t seem to ask is: how many movies do you want to own, versus how many do you just want to watch? The VHS rental industry exploded because people wanted to pay a couple bucks to see a movie – it was a low-cost grab bag, and if the movie was great then maybe you’ll rent it again in the future, and if it wasn’t? Well, onto the next one. RCA was so intent on replicating the vinyl record music ownership model that they didn’t realize what streaming services are now built upon: for most people, movies just don’t work that way. So… why couldn’t people just rent videodiscs? BECAUSE THEY COULDN’T.
Their contracts with movie distributors DID NOT ALLOW FOR RENTALS. RCA couldn’t have rented out video discs even if they wanted to. A certain kind of media satisfied RCA’s vision for how consumers would utilize home entertainment: because there are some movies people only wanted to watch at home. WITH THE DOOR LOCKED AND THE CURTAINS DRAWN. By 1984 pornographic films accounted for a full 50% of the sales and rentals of pre-recorded VHS tapes – it was a significant reason the VHS format took off. And RCA explicitly
prohibited adult films from being released on video disc because they thought it would tarnish RCA’s wholesome, family-friendly, puppy-staring-at-a-gramophone image. The VCR defined the entertainment of a generation. It built its legacy on movie rentals, recording live TV, and lust – 3 things the Selectavision couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do.
But ultimately… they were just too late. RCA Chairman Thornton Bradshaw reflected on its failure by saying, “Five years earlier it would have been a huge success. If we came out with it three years earlier, it would have been a good success.” And he’s probably right – if it really had come out shortly after that 1977 Popular Science article, it would have changed everything. Instead, RCA lost $580 million on the project – billions today. They stopped production on Selectavision players on April 4th, 1984. In December 1985, a damaged, devalued RCA was acquired by General Electric,
and 66 years of dominance in consumer electronics and communications was effectively over. They gambled it all on the Selectavision – and it cost them everything. Now we have access to every form of media we can imagine, most of it free – a lot of it we make ourselves, from TikTokers making short videos with their phones to YouTubers crafting video essays and documentaries. Every movie and TV show you can think of is on some app, live and archived sporting events are on demand worldwide, and every song you’ve ever heard is out there – and we don’t own any of it. Margaret Graham’s postmortem on the Selectavision concludes by saying that RCA “chose an approach that had only two possible outcomes – complete success or complete failure.”
RCA was right about everyone wanting a broad variety of immersive entertainment accessible from their homes, and now even in their pockets. They were wrong about how to do it. And the Selectavision’s “complete failure” took Nipper from staring into a gramophone to staring into the abyss. Okay. 27, 06, 22. Seek.
See… see you… see you in the f…fu…future.
2024-06-12 04:25
