The $580 Million Vinyl Movie Disaster (Selectavision)

We love our Technology Connections over here. Awesome video.

I bought a CED player in June of 1981. At the time it was the only way to build a library of films for home viewing at anything resembling a reasonable cost. Most prerecorded VHS tapes were almost $100 in the early ‘80s. The discs were, generally, beautifully produced and worked quite well. Skipping was relatively rare. The discs that are found in thrift stores have been used and abused, accounting for many of the problems with skipping that collectors have problems with today. I still have a functioning machine and most of the discs, purchased over 40 years ago, play well. It’s an ingenious, fun and unfairly maligned format.

It's sad that back then, corporations were interested in having consumers own their media, but now they don't want us to own anything at all.

This was actually a wonderful format to own at the time.New discs ran $19 to $49.95 while VHS and Beta would drain you at $89 per title. Ironically,the discs picture quality vastly improved a year before its demise. I owned about 70 titles before I sold it in 1986

Seems like it would be worthwhile to rip the video from those mystery discs and stick it on the Internet Archive, just to preserve those early performances from Lea Thompson and Paul Gleason.

Oh dip. Now that's a real Conn-extra.

The father of a friend of mine used to work for RCA and still had one of the players and the entire catalogue of movies in their basement. Logan's Run was great to watch this way.

My brother in law was an engineer at RCA during the computer fiasco AND Selectavision TOTAL fiasco. At family gatherings, he would just shake his head at the total idiocy of RCA's leadership. He was a member of the computer tape drive engineering team, but (in his words) thankfully had no part of the videodisc. He heard about the concept early on, laughed out loud, said this HAD to be a joke. And that was in 1976!

You can't do a video about obscure media format without seeing Technology Connections or Techmoan popping up nowadays. Good testament of their knowledge. 👍

I can personally say at least in the Washington, DC area in the early 80s there was a window where the CED discs were rented out along with Beta and VHS. They sat in their own meager, LP size rack in the middle of the store, looked down upon by the shelves and shelves of pre-recorded tapes, forlorn and friendless, never to be wanted, never to be loved.

That was an extremely well done and very comprehensive review and synopsis of the RCA Selectavision CED system. Bravo! In my opinion the interactive DisneyDisc of Mystery and Magic was easier to play than the 3 you reviewed. Of course, like all of the interactive CED's the play was basically just one or two sessions and done. BTW, I have the "Thanks for the Memories..." disc, catalog no. 62786 that was produced for RCA employees when the Rockville Road CED pressing plant ceased regular operations on June 27, 1986. I have way more discs than I'd care to admit to, but I haven't powered up my SKT-400 in over 15 years.

I find it strange a gen X'er never heard about laserdisc.

Technology Communications!? The crossover of the century.

Liked. Sent from my RCA Selectavision.

I owned a second generation RCA CED player. The disks took about twice as much space to store as a laser disk (thicker jacket). Video quality was better than VHS or BETA, but not as good as LD. However, RCA kept the cost of software below that of LD, that, and greater availability of the players and disks (LD machines and software were initially only sold in speciality high end stores, while the CED machines found shelf space in most department stores). Yeah, I knew there was a risk in buying the machine (that it would be abandoned), but at a cost of less than a VCR for the machine, and less than VHS for software, I got to enjoy a reasonable sized collection. CED disks would eventually wear out, it was believed that LDs would last forever, but that turned out to be false (laser rot?). The stylus actually didn't touch the surface of the disk, it floated above it on a cushion of air in the same way that the head of a hard disk does. However, unlike the hard disk, the player isn't sealed against dust, so there will be microscopic wear of the disk and stylus over time. The RCA CED system wasn't the only one developed, but was the only one for sale in the US. Two similar systems came out in Japan. I would later replace the CED player with a SONY LD combo machine (it would play, CDs, DVDs, Video CDs, as well as LDs. It also had a large frame buffer that allowed freeze framing in both CAV and CLV modes, along with a puck wheel to select single frames. There were some LD players that could play both sides of a disk without flipping it, and maybe even a dual tray player that held 2 disks at once. For a brief period, the price of LD software was dropped to capture market share (about the time that SONY entered the market with the machine).

I sold a PALLET of these DISCS ,700 of them ..about 15 years ago ,for less than $100 … they weighed a ton. Hence the pallet ..Got it out of a storage unit couldn’t sell them for nothing. I tried hard and finally I just got rid of them for next to nothing. Should’ve held onto them.

While over in Germany, Grundig gambled almost everything on a long forgotten video cassette format called Super Video Cassette. Only one model of machine was ever made. Then they gambled what was left on another video cassette format in partnership with Philips, called V2000. Then Grundig was finished, just like RCA.

If you thought the CED was a failure in North America, you haven't seen the United Kingdom. It was released over here in 1983 and was on the market for only SIX MONTHS! In total, we only got 272 titles released on it. One of which, funnily enough, is a '70s sex comedy.

I was amazed that so many people bought them. I saw demo machines in electronic stores. The disk image would to deteriorate very quickly. So every store where I saw one running had played the same disk over and over until the picture looked like a damages VHS tape. They also made strange mechanical noises, got jammed and eventually just sat there unplugged. It was obvious how delicate and wonky the thing was. I saw a Laserdisc demo in the mid-‘70s and was blown away. It was revolutionary. The Selectavision was bewildering.

I had no idea what these were when I bought three of the discs on Ebay for about ten quid in total in the early 2000s, Taxi Driver, Poltergeist and The Exorcist. I just loved the way they look, so I had them framed behind glass, Taxi Driver in the middle. Love the knowledge here.