April 24, 2019 • 49 mins
While the audio cassette was changing the music industry, the videocassette was wreaking havoc with Hollywood. And a new player, a CD player, was in the wings waiting.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios,
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
How Stuff Works and I Heart Radio and I love
all Things tech. And this is part four of a
multi part episode arc about technology and media and how
(00:28):
the changes in technology change the very business of entertainment
as well as our relationship to entertainment. And in the
previous three episodes, I traced the origins of recorded media,
the birth of the radio, film, and television industries, and
the rise of the humble audio cassette. And we've seen
that entertainment was gradually transitioning from something you could only
(00:50):
experience in the moment, such as when a radio station
would play a song or a theater would show a film.
And now we're in an age in which you could
you could own a permanent record of some of those things.
Now I've covered music up through the cassette era, so
we're going to switch back over to television and film
a bit and the birth of the video cassette. Now,
(01:10):
one of the challenges in early television was how do
you broadcast a television program to a national market, most
broadcasts were done live, and that limited your your options.
The United States is a really big country, so if
you did broadcast a show live, let's say that you've
(01:31):
worked out all the technical details, you still have time
as a factor. Because the two coasts of the United
States are in time zones, there are three hours apart
from each other, so prime time for one coast isn't
prime time for the other coast. Also, you were limited
in transmission range, and in the days before massive cable
(01:51):
companies had connected different regions using cable and satellites, you
had limited options. So it would be better if you
could find a a to record a show and then
broadcast it at a different time slot for other markets.
And most shows were being shot in New York, so
if you wanted to have a show in New York
air in Los Angeles, it made more sense to record
(02:14):
the show in New York and then send that recording,
perhaps even via cable, out to broadcast stations in Los Angeles,
which would then broadcast it. So you still have to
figure out a way to record the show you were
actually doing, and recording a show was easier said than done.
Television cameras and monitor technology was best suited for live broadcast,
(02:38):
so you would use a camera to capture images, but
send that signal directly to a transmitter and blasted out
over radio waves, and then television sets all over the
region would pick up those transmissions and show the live
broadcast right then and there. Before the invention of videotape,
one work around for this was the kinescope. This was
(03:00):
not an ideal solution. Basically, you would take a film camera,
kind of like the ones you would use to shoot
a movie, and it was typically either a sixteen millimeter
or a thirty five millimeter film camera, and you would
put it behind a television monitor. You would point it
at the TV monitor, so you would be shooting a
program on television cameras, and the monitor would actually be
(03:23):
displaying the image live on it, and then you would
use a film camera to capture the image of that
which was on the monitor screen. So viewers at home,
at least outside the region that you're directly serving, would
actually be looking at a picture of a picture. It's
as if you were to play a YouTube video on
your computer and then you use your phone's camera to
(03:44):
stream that video to someone else. It's not ideal. One
other thing had to be done for this to work.
By the way, the cameras actually had to be synchronized
to the monitors scanning rate. So you might remember I've
talked about this in other episodes. Cathode ray tube monitors
paint screens line by line from the top to the bottom.
So they paint a horizontal line, they move down, they
(04:05):
paint the next horizontal line. Technically they could paint every
other line and then do a second frame where they're
doing the other lines. So you do the all the
oddlines first, then all the even lines. But you get
the idea. It's the sequence of painting lines. Now it's
done so quickly that our brains can't process this. We
just see unbroken moving images. We don't see a series
(04:27):
of lines being painted on a screen. But if you
have a film camera that isn't synchronized with the scanning rate,
then you can pick up an artifact. Typically we see
this as sort of a rolling horizontal line moving across
the television screen in regular cycles. If you've ever seen
any real cheap productions that especially like home videos or
(04:49):
something that are pointed at a TV screen and you
see this weird line scanning across the screen over and
over again. That's what we're seeing. You're seeing this, uh,
the scan line or representa of that scan line. Because
the cycle of the camera is different from the scan
cycle of the monitor. Synchronizing the film camera to the
monitor scanning rate eliminated that artifact. The pictures were still
(05:13):
not great. They were grainy, They left a lot to
be desired, They could be kind of dark, be hard
to see what's going on. New York citizens typically got
a pretty darn good image because so much television production
was happening in New York City. So if you happen
to live near New York, you were getting the live
broadcast version. You were not getting the kiniscope version. But
(05:34):
if you lived in a different time zone, chances are
you were watching a kiniscope of those programs, and that
was pretty common in the nineteen forties and early nineteen fifties. Sadly,
a lot of kinscopes of early television programs have since
been lost. There wasn't much thought given to preserving television programs.
Early on TV studios were more concerned with churning out
(05:57):
content than keeping the stuff that they had. Are He
made and most stuff would just be broadcast live as
it happened in its home region and then only used
for rebroadcast for other time zones. It wasn't used for
any kind of rebroadcast of the original program, and once
it was done, it was time to move on. So
there was no real thought to stuff like syndication, and
(06:18):
the idea of home theater wasn't a thing for a
couple of decades. No one was thinking about how can
I watch the stuff at home on demand? So there's
a ton of stuff that was shown that we know
about but that we have no known recordings of. Um.
This isn't just to the United States. That's happened in
(06:38):
other places as well. In the United Kingdom, the BBC
was actually famous for not holding on to stuff that
future generations thought of as being historically important, but at
the time no one was really thinking about that. Even
in the days of videotape, once that became a thing,
the BBC was known for saving money by taping over
(06:59):
old videotape. There are a lot of stories about different
shows that survived that fate simply by purchasing the tapes directly.
Monty Pythons Flying Circus is one of those, Eric Idol
actually spent the money to buy the original tapes so
that the BBC wouldn't tape over them anyway. There were
a few exceptions to the kinescope approach. In n the
(07:21):
sitcom I Love Lucy broke new ground by filming every
episode using three film cameras, the classic three camera set
up for sitcoms, and they used those instead of television cameras,
so they would have a live studio audience, but they
would be using film cameras to capture everything, and then
the film was used to produce the episode for broadcast
(07:42):
to all markets, which drastically improved the quality and the
production cost for the show. So it because it was
so expensive, it wasn't done for everything it was. I
Love Lucy was kind of an exception because it was
high enough in demand for to justify by the expense.
But in something else was also happening. A guy named
(08:04):
Charles Ginsburg was hard at work trying to come up
with an alternative solution to this problem. Ginsburg had just
started working for a company called Ampex. That's the same
company that was instrumental in developing multitrack recorders for recording studios.
That I mentioned in the previous episode. So Ginsburg was
working to make a practical video tape recorder or vt R.
(08:27):
And if you listen to my last episode about cassettes,
you heard me talking about magnetic tape and how it works.
So I'm not going to repeat all of that here.
If you have not heard that previous episode, I recommend
you go check it out first, as the process for
recording audio to magnetic tape is pretty similar to recording
video to tape. Now, obviously video carries with it a
(08:50):
lot more information than just audio, but the process is
pretty similar. But here's here's a real super fast cliffs
Notes version of this. An electrical impulse passes through an
electro magnet, which then generates a fluctuating magnetic field, and
that magnetic field then magnetizes some sort of medium, and
(09:11):
in the case of videotape, we're talking about a tape
coded with ferro magnetic particles. The ferro magnetic particles retain
their magnetic properties after they pass under the electro magnet,
so they maintain their magnetic orientation. You can think of
it like that. And then if you run the tape
through a player, the reed head reverses this process. It
(09:32):
induces an electric current to flow through the player, which
can then be used to regenerate the recorded video and audio.
Now Ginsburg hailed from San Francisco and he had studied
engineering in college and he had been working in the
radio industry since nineteen forty eight. He was mainly focused
on studio and transmitter engineering, but he got the call
from Ampex in nineteen fifty one to join their team
(09:53):
to work on this problem. In fact, the founder of
Ampex himself, Alexander M. Poniata, gave gave Ginsburg a call
to bring him over, and Poniatov hope Ginsburg would be
able to help the company come up with the means
to record broadcast quality television to videotape, and there have
been some experiments with this, but the results had not
(10:16):
been really marketable. Promising but not marketable. So Ginsburg led
a team to design a system. Ampex patented his design
in nine two, and that same year Ray Dolby, whose
name should sound familiar if you're into sound, if you've
heard about Dolby Sound, he joined the project. He was
(10:36):
nineteen years old at the time, and his time with
the project would get interrupted as he would be called
into military service for a few years uh and then
he would rejoin the project anyway. This again is not
to say that these are the first people to ever
work on this problem or even produce technology that could
do some form of video to tape. Shortly after World
(10:59):
War Two, engineers had been trying to find ways to
preserve television on magnetic tape. But the previous efforts used
audio tape recorders, and in order to store the same
amount of information of video as you would with audio,
you had to run the recorders much faster. You had
to dedicate a lot more tape to hold all that
(11:20):
extra information since you had video on top of audio,
which meant that you had to run these things at
incredible speeds to achieve a high frequency response suitable for
preserving television. And by incredible speeds, I mean the tape
would pass under the recording tape head at a speed
of around two hundred forty or about six meters per second.
(11:42):
At that speed, even a short program would need an
enormous amount of tape. And that was just one typical approach.
Being Crosby, he wanted to be able to tape essentially
a month's worth of shows in a single week. That
way he would work for a week and then have
the next three weeks off. Sounds like d ill, I
wish I could do that. I just I don't think
(12:02):
I can physically record that many episodes in a week
and then take another month off. But he worked with
Ampex to use audio tape recorders, and with his approach
Crosby's approach, they were actually running even faster. They were
running out of speed of three hundred sixty inches per second.
That's nine meters per second of film or rather tape,
not film, but man super fast. So Ginsberg's team comes
(12:27):
up with a solution, but it wasn't easy. According to
Ginsburg himself, the project took four years of research and
testing to come up with a viable way to get
around this problem, and along the way the project was
shelved twice. Rather than have the tape pass at this
incredible rate of speed over the recording head or under
(12:48):
the recording head, the idea was build a rotating recording head.
The head would spin as tape passed underneath, and it
would record tracks of information in arcs and such as
a stom is called an arcuate recorder and That's a
word I had never encountered before I did the research
for this episode. In fact, the first time I saw
(13:08):
it printed, I thought perhaps I was looking at a
typo and what they meant to say was an accurate recorder.
But no, that meant they meant arquate, and that the
information was being recorded in arcs onto the tape um.
The recording head that Ginsburg's team built was actually the
initial one was actually three heads on a rotating drum,
(13:29):
and it would scan tape that was about two inches
in width or about five centimeters, and the tape would
move past the head at a relatively leisurely thirty inches
per second or seventy six point two centimeters per second,
which is still pretty fast, but nothing like the two
per second of the earlier method. What's more, the rotating
drums speed allowed Ginsburg to record the same amount of
(13:51):
information as he could if the tape were moving at
a blistering two thousand, five hundred inches per second. He
could cramp far more information onto a shorter length of
tape using this methodology. Still, this early prototype produced recordings that,
in Ginsberg's own words, produced and quote almost unrecognizable picture
(14:13):
end quote. The next prototype added another recording head, so
brought the total up to four on the drum, and
with some other technical changes that get a little too
complicated for me to go into in this episode. But
this version had its own problems and at this stage
the project was shelved. Technically, it was shelved for a
second time, and this happened around the summer of nineteen
(14:33):
fifty three, and the project would not officially start up
again in earnest until August nine. However, in that off time,
Ginsburg and others on his team would continue kind of
working on specific problems on the SLY and so they
were able to solve some of the issues. While the
project was officially no longer on the books, Ginsburg was
(14:56):
able to secure approval from management for a small number
of hours to be devoted to another prototype, and so
he and his team built a device that got the
name the Mark one. On September one, nineteen fifty four,
Ginsburg's team demonstrated the Mark one to executives and it
must have gone pretty well because Ampex authorized the project
(15:16):
to get back into full swing officially, and the major
change was how the information was being laid down on
the tape While the earlier prototypes were using that arquit approach,
in which each line of information moved in an arc
across the length of the tape, the new one laid
down the information in straight lines on the tape. Two
more years of refinements would follow until February ninety six.
(15:39):
That's when Ginsburg's team would give a new demo to
thirty Ampex executives, and in that demo, the team used
a new system, this one called the Mark four, to
record a video sequence live at the event. So they
shot video for a couple of minutes. Um they actually
set up a camera and shot video of the people
(16:00):
attending the meeting. Then they rewound the tape and they
fed it through the playback system, and according to Ginsburg,
at the conclusion of the playback, the whole room erupted
with a celebration, so it must have gone pretty darn well.
They followed that up with a demonstration of the Mark
four at the National Association of Broadcasters conference, and it
was a huge hit, and Ampex started to get orders
(16:22):
for its technology, which would change TV production and preservation
and lay the groundwork for home theaters. When we come back,
i'll talk more about that evolution and how the video
tape recorder made its transition to the video cassette recorder.
But first, let's take a quick break. So the video
(16:46):
tape recorder or VTR got real start in n S.
CBS would jump on board first, but other other networks
would join suit, and for about two decades that's where
videotape lived. In the production side, it was very rare
to run into a consumer video tape machine. The systems
(17:08):
cost thousands of dollars when they first came out, like
fifty thou dollars uh, and that was well beyond the
reach of consumers. And the tape was also really expensive
and it was it was like three dollars a foot,
so it was prohibitively expensive for almost everyone. This was
not a consumer device, but a professional production machine. You
(17:29):
wouldn't have one in your own home unless you were
extravagantly wealthy and probably a little bit eccentric. So Ampex
would continue to improve its technology, but other companies also
got into the mix with their own video tape recorders,
and the quest for a consumer device would take a
little longer. You had different companies UH experimenting with different
(17:50):
widths of videotape, different styles of recording heads. Uh, So
you had a lot of different companies all trying to
become the industry leader and to top Ampex. Meanwhile, you
had a company out of the UK called the Nottingham
Electric Valve Company that marketed a device called the tail
Cam in the early nineteen sixties, and this was technically
(18:13):
the first, or at least one of the first home
video recording devices on record. This one was pretty limited.
It could only record about twenty minutes of video per tape,
and it was real to real tape. It was not
a cassette, so you actually had to mount reels on
this device like the old real to real audio recorders.
The quality of the recording wasn't terribly good. The device
(18:35):
itself was a bit of a chore to use, and
on top of it all, it was expensive. So Tellcan
didn't really seem much success and it would fade away,
it wouldn't get market support. According to the website Inventricity,
only two tell Can units are known to exist today.
One of them is in Nottingham and the other one
(18:56):
is in San Francisco. Ampex introduced a real to real
recorder in nineteen sixty three in the United States called
the Signature five, which used two inch tape, so it's
about five centimeters wide. The following year, Phillips would introduce
a different reel to reel video recorder meant for semi
professional use or what we might refer to as the
(19:16):
pro sumer market. It could only record in black and white,
and the tape of the reels measured one inch or
about two point five centimeters in width. And then Sony
introduced the CV twenty twenty, which was another reel to
reel video recorder that used half inch tape. And all
of these were expensive units and the real to real
nature meant they weren't very user friendly. You know, you
(19:38):
still had to feed the tape through the machine and
then uh, get it attached to the secondary reel and
then feed it, you know, play it from there. That
was not easy to do. So like the earlier tel Can,
they didn't get a widespread adoption among consumers. If you
were technically savvy and you had a whole bunch of cash,
(20:02):
then maybe you had one, but otherwise it probably passed
you by. The real to real format had a lot
of drawbacks because the tape, just like film could be
easily damaged by environmental forces. There was nothing protecting the
tape from stuff like dust or fingers or dogs, and
(20:23):
so you could very easily damage the tape and ruin
your recording. Companies were working on prototypes of a form
factor that would greatly simplify the use of a tape,
and one of those was Sony, which had started working
on video cassettes back in nineteen sixty nine and its
research and development department. In nine seventy, Sony, Panasonic, and
(20:45):
JVC arrived at an agreed upon standard for video cassettes,
ensuring that the different companies would create recording and playback
devices as well as cassettes that could work together across
the different companies products. So if you bought a any
video cassette player, then you bought a cassette that was
(21:05):
made by j VC, you could be sure that the
two would work together. In Sony introduced the U Matic,
which is arguably the first video cassette recorder or VCR,
but the name VCR actually comes from a different device,
the Phillips Video Cassette Recorder. That one came out a
couple of months after Sony's. It didn't seem much consumer success,
(21:29):
but lower budget television stations relied on it to record
broadcasts to video and in fact in TV production. The
you Matic would stick around until the nineteen nineties, so
while it didn't become a vague home device, it did
play a very important role in TV production behind the scenes.
A company called c t I introduced another cassette player
(21:51):
called the cartra Vision in nineteen seventy two. It became
the first company to offer pre recorded films for purchase
for the home. So this was the first time you
had a company not just produce a player, but also
make deals with production studios to get licensing for films
or television programs and then to offer them for sale.
(22:14):
So now people had the option to actually own a
copy of a film, making it possible to watch whenever
they wanted. It was a huge, huge deal, right. This
was a breakthrough in approach, but the cart Revision as
a format didn't last very long. It didn't take off,
so while the concept was important, the actual implementation didn't work.
(22:38):
All of those early devices were really expensive and that
contributed to their lack of tractions. So while we started
to see the promise of this technology, it wasn't quite
at the level where it could be commercially viable for
the home consumer. That changed in UH. Sony and j
VC had a little parting of the ways. Had worked
(23:00):
together to create the standard for you Matic, but now
Sony was looking to develop its own proprietary approach for
the home market UH, and so they were both trying
different proprietary approaches at the same time. Sony's version was
the Beta Max format, which was smaller than the u
(23:21):
Matic format. If you had a Pumatic cassette and a
Beta Max cassette side by side, you'd see the Beta
Max cassette was smaller, and it was able to produce
recordings of a comparable quality to you Matic. It wasn't
quite as good, but it was pretty good. It's really close.
Then j v C would follow suit in nineteen seventy
six with the introduction of the VHS format, and thus
(23:43):
began one of the famous format wars that we talked
about in Tech Beta Max versus VHS. It's a story
that we've seen play out lots of different times, and
it's a story we're going to revisit in a future
episode with Blu Ray versus HD DVD Beta mat X
had the edge over VHS when it came to picture quality,
the quality was slightly better. The difference wasn't a dramatic one,
(24:08):
but Beta Max could legitimately claim our picture has higher
resolution than VHS. However, VHS tapes could hold more content
than Beta Max tapes could. Early Beta Max tapes had
a limit of about an hour's worth of material, so
you couldn't even get a full movie on a single
Beta Max cassette. In the early days, VHS could outperform
(24:28):
in that space. With a VHS tape, even an early one,
you could record a whole film onto one cassette. Later
on you would be able to film to record multiple
films on a single cassette. The HS slowly got the
upper hand in the format wars, and by night one,
the VHS format accounted for seventy five of the VCR market.
The Beta Max share would drop continuously at you know
(24:51):
it was that twenty in nine. By night six it
was down to just seven point five percent of the market.
So VHS dominated in the space. But while VHS and
Beta Max were fighting for supremacy, there was another fight
that was boiling regarding the practice of videotaping at home
at all. This one originated in Hollywood. So in nineteen
(25:14):
seventy six, the same year that JVC would debut the
VHS format, the movie studio Universal Pictures filed a copyright
infringement lawsuit against Sony. The argument Universal made was that
just by creating a device capable of recording video images
off of a television, Sony had violated copyright law. Akio Marita,
(25:35):
Sony's founder, had said that the Beta max device allowed
for a time shift approach to television. That's something we'll
talk about again. Upon the development of the digital video recorder,
so the idea was no longer would you have audiences
being dependent upon the broadcast schedule of TV stations. I
don't know if all of you guys remember this. Some
(25:56):
of you young ones may not have ever known a
world like this, but back in the day, we were
completely dependent upon the broadcast schedule of television stations. If
you were not home at eight pm on a Thursday night,
you were not going to see that next episode of
I don't know, cheers um, unless you had to have
(26:17):
happened to have a VCR where you could set it
to record while you were away and then you could
time shift. You could watch the program whenever you wanted
on your schedule. So it was kind of like an
on demand kind of approach, except you had to actually
actively record the show first. But before there were VCRs
that there was no option. You were either home to
watch it or you missed it and that was it.
(26:40):
So Marita's argument was, this is going to give the
consumer far more flexibility in the consumption of entertainment. So
you could leave your home, you set your recorder to
capture a program or a film on television, and then
you can watch it whenever you wanted. It's something we
take for granted now, but this was a brand new
idea in the nineties seventies. It was revolutionary. But Lou
(27:02):
Wasserman of m c A slash Universal had different plans. See,
he had an idea that his company was going to
partner with some other companies on developing a proprietary playback device.
Uh primarily they were going to partner with Phillips and
this device was called disco Vision and would later be
called the Laser Disc. And the plan was to release
(27:23):
content for this device and it would only be able
to play that content back it couldn't record anything, It
could only play back prerecorded material, and that would give
Universal full control of its television and film libraries. They
could say, hey, do you want to see our movies,
Well you can do that, but the only way you
can do it is to go through us, to buy
(27:45):
these proprietary discs that will run on this proprietary hardware
and UH. That way they could have full control of
the situation. Walt Disney Productions would join with Universal in
this lawsuit against uh UH, the Sony, and and they
sought to block all sales of Beta Max machines. Now,
Sony argued that the Beta Max was similar to tape recorders,
(28:09):
which had been deemed a legal product all the way
back in the nineteen sixties. So the U. S. District
Court would hear the case in nineteen seventy nine, and
they ruled in favor of Sony. But then the case
went to an appeals court and the appeals court reversed
the decision in nineteen one. However, at this point, the
VCR was really doing pretty well. VCR sales were picking up,
(28:32):
and the VHS format, which wasn't even Beta Max, was
already ahead of the Sony beta max approach. So even
if the the court had argued that there needs to
be a block on beta max sales, VHS was already winning. However,
the case would continue through the court system, finally making
(28:53):
its way all the way to the United States Supreme
Court in four and the Supreme Court reversed the appeals
court decision and ruled in favor for Sony that settled
the matter officially saying these devices do not violate copyright law.
By half of all American households would own a VCR.
(29:14):
As for the movie studios well, Even as the case
was making its way through the court, it became clear
that video cassettes actually represented a new line of revenue
generation that it wasn't going to hurt the studios. It
could actually really help them. Studios could dive into their
back catalogs of movies and sell video cassettes to consumers
(29:35):
movies that would otherwise just sit in a storage facility,
maybe like an old salt mine. They could actually earn money. Again.
Even Walt Disney Productions would jump on board, though that
was largely due to a change in leadership because a
guy named Michael Eisner became CEO of the company, and
Eisner led the studio to release several of their classic
films on video cassette, and before long, Disney Movies captured
(29:59):
something like seven out of the top ten best selling
video tapes of all time, so it was a very
much a winning strategy for Walt Disney, even though earlier
the company had opposed the technology. That same year was
when the videotape industry actually overtook the film industry in revenue,
(30:19):
and it turned out the fears of piracy were largely misplaced.
Just like audio cassettes, most VCRs can only record at
the same speed as the playback of a source, so
if you're trying to tape a two hour movie, it
would take you two hours to tape it. It wasn't
the sort of thing that the average person could do
to just churn out pirated copies of videos. Though if
(30:41):
you got your hands on some semi professional equipment, you
could do it at a faster clip. You could reproduce
video tapes faster than your your you know, store brand VCR,
but that was an investment most folks weren't able to make.
So it was possible to generate, you know, lots of
of unlicensed copies of a film, but only if you
(31:04):
had access to this equipment. If you were just using
two VCRs at home, it was such a painstakingly long
process that it didn't make much sense now. In the
early days, prerecorded video cassettes were really expensive, like if
you wanted to go out and buy a movie on
video cassette, you were showing out some big bucks. For example,
when Columbia Pictures made Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters available for purchase on VHS,
(31:30):
each copy costs the princely sum of eighty dollars. The
company sold more than four hundred thousand copies of the
film at that price, And if you want to adjust
it for inflation in today's cash, that's nearly a hundred
ninety dollars for a copy of a movie. And that's
just for one film. Yikes, switching gears for a second.
(31:50):
The birth of the video cassette also led to the
birth of another industry that a video rental. It's pretty
much agreed that the first, honest to goodness real video
rental store was created by George Atkinson in nineteen seventy
seven in Los Angeles, California. A guy named Andre Blair
had negotiated with studios to license the rights for a
few dozen films to be recorded to videotape for sale,
(32:13):
and Atkinson bought up some copies of those films that
that Blay had licensed, and then he started to offer
those up as rentals. Atkinson actually faced some opposition for
this business, with entertainment companies threatening to sue him, but
he researched copyright law and he saw that he had
the right, as the owner of a copy of a
work to rent or resell his copy. He wasn't doing
(32:35):
anything illegal, he wasn't duplicating the films, He was just
renting the copy he happened to own. Other video rental
stores opened in different parts of the country, and by
night one the owners of several of these stores or
small chains of stores got together to form an industry
organization they called the Video Software Dealers Association, and the
(32:58):
purpose of that organization was to help TechEd video rental
stores from litigation and changes to what is called the
first sale doctrine, as the concept that says a copyright
holder can't stop someone from lending out or reselling their
legally acquired copy of a copyrighted work without those protections.
Stuff like libraries would cease to exist because of legal challenges.
(33:19):
But because this doctrine is in place, I can do
stuff like by a VHS copy of Tron, and later
on I can sell it at a garage sale without
worrying about getting sued for it or whether if I
am sued for it, I'll win. Now, one thing that
I couldn't do is I wouldn't be allowed to make
copies of that Tron tape and then sell those copies
to other people. The right to reproduce a copyrighted work
(33:42):
falls to the owner of the copyright. The most I
could do is I can make a backup copy of
the Tron tape that I own myself, and I'm not
selling it. I'm not lending it out. I make a
backup copy and I put it away in a safe place,
just in case my original tape breaks or something else
goes wrong. Backup copies fall under the category of fair
(34:02):
use and copyright law, meaning it's a fair use of
the copyrighted work. So there's some fine lines to walk
in this arena. And developments and technology are what made
these these ideas necessary, And the same thing holds true
for record albums and other stuff. Like if I owned
a vinyl album, I would be allowed to transfer that
to audio cassette in order for me to have a
(34:24):
backup copy of that vinyl album should something happen to it.
But I couldn't make copies of it over and over
and over again and then give it away or sell
it to friends. That would be a violation of copyright.
This is also going to become important when we move
to digital music, and we'll see that in future episodes. So,
the video cassette was changing the business of entertainment and
it allowed for the establishment of video rental companies. The
(34:47):
men that filmmakers and entertainers had a new market they
could exploit. This is also when enterprising individuals started making
content specifically for the home video market. Some we're making
stuff like self help videos or exercise videos, or made
for video films and shows. Stuff that couldn't get distribution
in theaters or on television could find a home on
(35:07):
video cassette. And boy, if you've ever gone through the
bargain bins that have had video cassettes in them, you've
probably seen some examples of this stuff that you otherwise
never would have heard of. And the late nineteen eighties,
studios began to drop the price of prerecorded video cassettes,
with tapes dropping below thirty dollars a title, and the
video cassette era boomed, with VCRs becoming a common component
(35:30):
in homes around the world. It would also set the
stage for future technologies like the DVD player and later
still the HD DVD player and the Blu ray player.
Those technologies rely on a completely different approach to recording media,
but the business side of selling and renting copies and
the consumer relationship with the technology would be similar to
that of the VCR and the video cassette. It also
(35:51):
helped establish practices and precedents that would be important upon
the introduction of devices like digital video recorders. So for now,
let's shift not in time but in top So when
we come back, I'll talk a bit about a different
technology that would displace the audio cassette in the consumer
music world, the compact disc. But first let's take another
quick break. While the audio cassette, sometimes called the compact cassette,
(36:20):
was gearing up to take over the top spot in
consumer audio from the vinyl record album, its successor was
already in development, the compact disc, which would be able
to preserve music and a high fidelity much higher than
what audio cassettes could do at the time, and with
proper care, could last much longer than audio cassettes was
(36:40):
starting to take shape. Interestingly, the compact disc kind of
rose out of a failure, namely that the aforementioned laser disc.
So while magnetic tape stored information using magnetism, laser discs
and later CDs and DVDs and blu rays and h
D DVDs used optical storage uh optical storage, meaning that
(37:02):
it was all done with light. So a physicist named
James Russell pioneered this technology all the way back in
the nineteen sixties. He's a brilliant physicist and also a
lover of music. That led him kind of down this
pathway to determine how could he create a new form
of storage media. He was wanting to make something that
(37:24):
would preserve music better than the vinyl form factor. See,
he was frustrated because the vinyl album methodology means you're
going to be wearing out your records if you listen
to them a lot, because you're using a physical stylus
or needle. It's making its way through the grooves on
the record, and as it does so, it starts to
(37:47):
wear down those grooves a little bit. So if you
listen to the same vinyl album enough times, you're going
to negatively affect the quality of the sound you get
when you play it back. It just starts to wear down.
So he said, we need some way to play back
music that doesn't require physical contact between the media and
the playback device. There needs to be some way where
(38:08):
whatever the sensor is that's picking up the information isn't
directly touching the actual surface that holds that information. He
determined that if you converted music into binary data. In
other words, if you encoded the music in zeros and
ones the information of computers in bits, and you did
(38:30):
that to describe everything about the music, you know, all
the frequencies, all the volumes, you could store this music
digitally onto a medium. By the way, this is essentially
the idea that Ada Lovelace had way back in the
eighteen hundreds when she was working with Charles Babbage. She
(38:52):
had suggested that mathematics could be used to represent all
sorts of things, including music, and that's essentially what Russell
was saying as well. He was specifically talking about binary
whereas uh Lovelace did not quite get to that point,
but Russell was saying, no, we could. We could totally
describe music in bits and be able to encode it
(39:15):
in that way, and then using the proper decoding, you
could decipher the information and replicate the performance. So if
you use light to pick up this digital information, you
wouldn't need physical contact with the recorded surface of a
piece of media. So he filed for a patent in
nineteen sixty six for what he called the Digital to
(39:36):
Optical Recording and Playback System, and he received the patent
in nineteen seventy. Russell used a photo sensitive platter and
he programmed it by making alternating dark and light bits
measuring about a micron in size. So to play back
what was recorded on the platter, he used a laser
(39:57):
to scan it, and the laser was register during the
tiny pits on the platter. Those pits represented the binary
patterns on the platter. So these pits were telling the
system whether it was a zero or one. And you
had some very nice mirrors to reflect any light that
was being picked up, and that was what was indicating
(40:18):
whether or not it was a pit. Or just a
regular plateau on the platter. This became sort of the
basis for the laser disc. Universal and Phillips would license
the pattern from Russell, but they departed from Russell's plan. See,
Russell wanted to record in pure digital. He wanted to
convert everything into binary information. Everything was supposed to be bits.
(40:40):
The laser disc went a slightly different way. So the
laser disc would record information on a platter on a
disc in the form of little pits, just like Russell's vision,
but the encoding was analog, not digital, so instead of
it being a representation of zeros and ones, the shape
and the length of the pits indicated the analog information
(41:03):
that was encoded onto the disc. So you could argue
the laser disc is mostly an analog format, which it
gets really confusing because you're using an optical approach, but
it is technically, at least in some definitions, and analog medium. Now,
to get into the real reasons why this is so
(41:23):
would require a much more in depth look at the
laser disc, and honestly, I don't have the time to
do that in this episode, so I'll save that for
a future episode. I'll do a full episode just about
the development of the laser disc in a future episode
of tech Stuff, But it was a fundamentally different approach
to what Russell was working on this. The pits on
(41:44):
the laser disc look kind of like the ones you
would see on a c D or a DVD or
a Blu ray if you had a microscope to really
look at them, but they didn't represent digital bits of
information in the same way. All right, So back to Russell.
I want to take a second here to point out
that russ really was a genius still is. It's not
just that he came up with a new method of
(42:05):
storing data onto a medium. He was also able to
figure out how to encode audio in binary data so
that it could be decoded and played back, and it
took years of hard work and research to pull it
all off. Digital recording is different from analog, and I've
done episodes about this as well, so I'm not going
to go into great detail, but I do want to
(42:26):
kind of address this for a little bit. With analog,
you've got a continuous input signal, right, It's like if
you were to look at a wave, it's just a
steady wave that is unbroken. Binary is a little bit different.
With binary, you sample an incoming signal. UH sampling is
(42:47):
kind of like taking snapshots of a signal, and the
more samples you take per given unit of time, the
greater the resolution of your recording. I'm going to give
you a quick analogy this. This is just a sort
of visualize while I'm talking about. So let's say you're
standing outside of a room and the door to that
room is currently closed. It's a very heavy door. You
(43:09):
can open the door, but shortly after you open it,
you have to let go and it'll slam shut. So
when you open the door, you can hear what's going
on inside the room, but when the door is closed,
you can't make out what's going on. And because the
door will slam shut shortly after you open it, you
only get a moment to hear something. So you open
the door quickly and you hear a lot of people
(43:30):
being loud, but you only hear it for that instant
before the door shuts and you can't hear anything else.
And at that moment, you can't really draw any conclusions
about what you just heard. You just heard people being loud.
You don't know if they're happy or they're angry, or
they're scared, or they're just trying to talk over each other.
So you open the door again. And the more times
(43:51):
you're able to open the door, the better an idea
you have of what's going on inside that room. And
if you're able to open up the door very quickly,
like right after it closes, it could be almost like
you're hearing what's going on in the room uninterrupted. Of course,
from an outside observer, you would look like you were
quite eccentric as you kept on opening a door that
kept shutting on you. Digital sampling is a little bit
(44:13):
like that, though it gets much more technical as you
might imagine. But the digital nature of processing the sound
opened up a new battleground between audio files and people
just wanted easy access to music. I'll touch on that
a bit more in the next episode. The LaserDisc gathered
a devoted audience of film lovers, but the expense of
the devices and the limited video library meant and didn't
(44:37):
get widespread adoption the man, You know, LaserDiscs were pretty
darn neat. You typically had to flip them over to
watch a whole movie. One side might hold thirty or
sixty minutes worth of materials, so they had a limited capacity.
But they also introduced other stuff that would become standard
in future formats, stuff like extra features which you wouldn't
get in a typical VHS tape. You know, you buy
(44:58):
a VHS tape of a movie, you get the movie.
You buy a laser disc of the movie, you might
get some commentary, you might get extra scenes, you might
get a lot of stuff, and you could jump around
and watch different scenes through essentially the random access approach.
But you couldn't do that with VHS. You had to
just watch at whatever point the tape was at. You
could fast forward or rewind, but you couldn't just jump
(45:22):
to a chapter or something. You could do that with
laser discs. So this was stuff that would carry over
into the DVD and Blu ray eras and it opened
up new opportunities and entertainment. So again we see how
the evolution of technology would change the actual business of entertainment.
Phillips initially was ready to say sayannara to the optical
(45:42):
storage format after the laser disc failed to win out
over the cassette based video formats that were already on
the market, but eventually the company, along with Sony came
around to the idea for audio discs, and the compact
disc was born. Phillips unveiled a prototype of the compact
disc in teen seventy nine, but it would be a
few years before the format was standardized. For one thing,
(46:04):
Sony allegedly demanded that a single compact disc would need
to be able to hold an entire performance of Beethoven's
Ninth Symphony. So, if you've ever wondered why a standard
c D is four point seven inches or twelve centimeters
in diameter, allegedly it's because of Beethoven. The duration of
Beethoven's symphony depends upon the arrangement, but typically the Ninth
(46:29):
Symphony tends to last somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy minutes. However,
they were looking for the longest version of the symphony
recorded to make that the standard, and it clocked in
at around seventy four minutes. And to hold that much audio,
the CD would have to be twelve centimeters in diameter,
and there we have it. Phillips and Sony established the
standards for CDs in nineteen eighty, with Phillips showing off
(46:51):
the first production model meant for consumers two years later,
and according to the BBC, the first two commercial c
D presses ever were a recording of Strauss's Alpine Symphony
and the immortal album The Visitors by Abba Super. When
the CD got started in the early nineteen eighties, it
wouldn't really start to be a threat to the cassette
(47:13):
until the nineteen nineties. So in our next episode will
continue our look at the c D and its impact
on the entertainment industry, including more about the audio file
objection I mentioned earlier. Will also look into the birth
of DVDs and their successors and lay the ground for
the digital file era. I hope you guys are enjoying
this series. I really like looking at this sort of
(47:35):
big picture stuff, this evolution of technology and how that
changed not just the business, but are very thoughts around entertainment,
how our attitudes about entertainment have changed as the technology
has enabled different ways to consume that that entertainment um
to me. This is what I love most about tech stuff,
(47:57):
is this relationship between technology industry and our our society.
So I hope you guys are enjoying this, and if
you're not, don't worry. Pretty soon we're gonna be off
this topic and talking about all sorts of other stuff.
If you have your own suggestions of what I should
be covering next, why not send me an email the
addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com or
(48:20):
pop on over to tech stuff podcast dot com. That's
our website where you'll find the archive of all of
our older episodes, plus you'll find links to our social
media presence. You can reach out to me on Facebook
or on Twitter and I'll be happy to hear your
suggestions there as well. And also don't forget to head
on over to our store and if you purchase something
over there, it goes to help the show and we
(48:40):
greatly appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again really soon.
Hex Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How
Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit
the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. Three
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios,
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
How Stuff Works and I Heart Radio and I love
all Things tech. And this is part four of a
multi part episode arc about technology and media and how
(00:28):
the changes in technology change the very business of entertainment
as well as our relationship to entertainment. And in the
previous three episodes, I traced the origins of recorded media,
the birth of the radio, film, and television industries, and
the rise of the humble audio cassette. And we've seen
that entertainment was gradually transitioning from something you could only
(00:50):
experience in the moment, such as when a radio station
would play a song or a theater would show a film.
And now we're in an age in which you could
you could own a permanent record of some of those things.
Now I've covered music up through the cassette era, so
we're going to switch back over to television and film
a bit and the birth of the video cassette. Now,
(01:10):
one of the challenges in early television was how do
you broadcast a television program to a national market, most
broadcasts were done live, and that limited your your options.
The United States is a really big country, so if
you did broadcast a show live, let's say that you've
(01:31):
worked out all the technical details, you still have time
as a factor. Because the two coasts of the United
States are in time zones, there are three hours apart
from each other, so prime time for one coast isn't
prime time for the other coast. Also, you were limited
in transmission range, and in the days before massive cable
(01:51):
companies had connected different regions using cable and satellites, you
had limited options. So it would be better if you
could find a a to record a show and then
broadcast it at a different time slot for other markets.
And most shows were being shot in New York, so
if you wanted to have a show in New York
air in Los Angeles, it made more sense to record
(02:14):
the show in New York and then send that recording,
perhaps even via cable, out to broadcast stations in Los Angeles,
which would then broadcast it. So you still have to
figure out a way to record the show you were
actually doing, and recording a show was easier said than done.
Television cameras and monitor technology was best suited for live broadcast,
(02:38):
so you would use a camera to capture images, but
send that signal directly to a transmitter and blasted out
over radio waves, and then television sets all over the
region would pick up those transmissions and show the live
broadcast right then and there. Before the invention of videotape,
one work around for this was the kinescope. This was
(03:00):
not an ideal solution. Basically, you would take a film camera,
kind of like the ones you would use to shoot
a movie, and it was typically either a sixteen millimeter
or a thirty five millimeter film camera, and you would
put it behind a television monitor. You would point it
at the TV monitor, so you would be shooting a
program on television cameras, and the monitor would actually be
(03:23):
displaying the image live on it, and then you would
use a film camera to capture the image of that
which was on the monitor screen. So viewers at home,
at least outside the region that you're directly serving, would
actually be looking at a picture of a picture. It's
as if you were to play a YouTube video on
your computer and then you use your phone's camera to
(03:44):
stream that video to someone else. It's not ideal. One
other thing had to be done for this to work.
By the way, the cameras actually had to be synchronized
to the monitors scanning rate. So you might remember I've
talked about this in other episodes. Cathode ray tube monitors
paint screens line by line from the top to the bottom.
So they paint a horizontal line, they move down, they
(04:05):
paint the next horizontal line. Technically they could paint every
other line and then do a second frame where they're
doing the other lines. So you do the all the
oddlines first, then all the even lines. But you get
the idea. It's the sequence of painting lines. Now it's
done so quickly that our brains can't process this. We
just see unbroken moving images. We don't see a series
(04:27):
of lines being painted on a screen. But if you
have a film camera that isn't synchronized with the scanning rate,
then you can pick up an artifact. Typically we see
this as sort of a rolling horizontal line moving across
the television screen in regular cycles. If you've ever seen
any real cheap productions that especially like home videos or
(04:49):
something that are pointed at a TV screen and you
see this weird line scanning across the screen over and
over again. That's what we're seeing. You're seeing this, uh,
the scan line or representa of that scan line. Because
the cycle of the camera is different from the scan
cycle of the monitor. Synchronizing the film camera to the
monitor scanning rate eliminated that artifact. The pictures were still
(05:13):
not great. They were grainy, They left a lot to
be desired, They could be kind of dark, be hard
to see what's going on. New York citizens typically got
a pretty darn good image because so much television production
was happening in New York City. So if you happen
to live near New York, you were getting the live
broadcast version. You were not getting the kiniscope version. But
(05:34):
if you lived in a different time zone, chances are
you were watching a kiniscope of those programs, and that
was pretty common in the nineteen forties and early nineteen fifties. Sadly,
a lot of kinscopes of early television programs have since
been lost. There wasn't much thought given to preserving television programs.
Early on TV studios were more concerned with churning out
(05:57):
content than keeping the stuff that they had. Are He
made and most stuff would just be broadcast live as
it happened in its home region and then only used
for rebroadcast for other time zones. It wasn't used for
any kind of rebroadcast of the original program, and once
it was done, it was time to move on. So
there was no real thought to stuff like syndication, and
(06:18):
the idea of home theater wasn't a thing for a
couple of decades. No one was thinking about how can
I watch the stuff at home on demand? So there's
a ton of stuff that was shown that we know
about but that we have no known recordings of. Um.
This isn't just to the United States. That's happened in
(06:38):
other places as well. In the United Kingdom, the BBC
was actually famous for not holding on to stuff that
future generations thought of as being historically important, but at
the time no one was really thinking about that. Even
in the days of videotape, once that became a thing,
the BBC was known for saving money by taping over
(06:59):
old videotape. There are a lot of stories about different
shows that survived that fate simply by purchasing the tapes directly.
Monty Pythons Flying Circus is one of those, Eric Idol
actually spent the money to buy the original tapes so
that the BBC wouldn't tape over them anyway. There were
a few exceptions to the kinescope approach. In n the
(07:21):
sitcom I Love Lucy broke new ground by filming every
episode using three film cameras, the classic three camera set
up for sitcoms, and they used those instead of television cameras,
so they would have a live studio audience, but they
would be using film cameras to capture everything, and then
the film was used to produce the episode for broadcast
(07:42):
to all markets, which drastically improved the quality and the
production cost for the show. So it because it was
so expensive, it wasn't done for everything it was. I
Love Lucy was kind of an exception because it was
high enough in demand for to justify by the expense.
But in something else was also happening. A guy named
(08:04):
Charles Ginsburg was hard at work trying to come up
with an alternative solution to this problem. Ginsburg had just
started working for a company called Ampex. That's the same
company that was instrumental in developing multitrack recorders for recording studios.
That I mentioned in the previous episode. So Ginsburg was
working to make a practical video tape recorder or vt R.
(08:27):
And if you listen to my last episode about cassettes,
you heard me talking about magnetic tape and how it works.
So I'm not going to repeat all of that here.
If you have not heard that previous episode, I recommend
you go check it out first, as the process for
recording audio to magnetic tape is pretty similar to recording
video to tape. Now, obviously video carries with it a
(08:50):
lot more information than just audio, but the process is
pretty similar. But here's here's a real super fast cliffs
Notes version of this. An electrical impulse passes through an
electro magnet, which then generates a fluctuating magnetic field, and
that magnetic field then magnetizes some sort of medium, and
(09:11):
in the case of videotape, we're talking about a tape
coded with ferro magnetic particles. The ferro magnetic particles retain
their magnetic properties after they pass under the electro magnet,
so they maintain their magnetic orientation. You can think of
it like that. And then if you run the tape
through a player, the reed head reverses this process. It
(09:32):
induces an electric current to flow through the player, which
can then be used to regenerate the recorded video and audio.
Now Ginsburg hailed from San Francisco and he had studied
engineering in college and he had been working in the
radio industry since nineteen forty eight. He was mainly focused
on studio and transmitter engineering, but he got the call
from Ampex in nineteen fifty one to join their team
(09:53):
to work on this problem. In fact, the founder of
Ampex himself, Alexander M. Poniata, gave gave Ginsburg a call
to bring him over, and Poniatov hope Ginsburg would be
able to help the company come up with the means
to record broadcast quality television to videotape, and there have
been some experiments with this, but the results had not
(10:16):
been really marketable. Promising but not marketable. So Ginsburg led
a team to design a system. Ampex patented his design
in nine two, and that same year Ray Dolby, whose
name should sound familiar if you're into sound, if you've
heard about Dolby Sound, he joined the project. He was
(10:36):
nineteen years old at the time, and his time with
the project would get interrupted as he would be called
into military service for a few years uh and then
he would rejoin the project anyway. This again is not
to say that these are the first people to ever
work on this problem or even produce technology that could
do some form of video to tape. Shortly after World
(10:59):
War Two, engineers had been trying to find ways to
preserve television on magnetic tape. But the previous efforts used
audio tape recorders, and in order to store the same
amount of information of video as you would with audio,
you had to run the recorders much faster. You had
to dedicate a lot more tape to hold all that
(11:20):
extra information since you had video on top of audio,
which meant that you had to run these things at
incredible speeds to achieve a high frequency response suitable for
preserving television. And by incredible speeds, I mean the tape
would pass under the recording tape head at a speed
of around two hundred forty or about six meters per second.
(11:42):
At that speed, even a short program would need an
enormous amount of tape. And that was just one typical approach.
Being Crosby, he wanted to be able to tape essentially
a month's worth of shows in a single week. That
way he would work for a week and then have
the next three weeks off. Sounds like d ill, I
wish I could do that. I just I don't think
(12:02):
I can physically record that many episodes in a week
and then take another month off. But he worked with
Ampex to use audio tape recorders, and with his approach
Crosby's approach, they were actually running even faster. They were
running out of speed of three hundred sixty inches per second.
That's nine meters per second of film or rather tape,
not film, but man super fast. So Ginsberg's team comes
(12:27):
up with a solution, but it wasn't easy. According to
Ginsburg himself, the project took four years of research and
testing to come up with a viable way to get
around this problem, and along the way the project was
shelved twice. Rather than have the tape pass at this
incredible rate of speed over the recording head or under
(12:48):
the recording head, the idea was build a rotating recording head.
The head would spin as tape passed underneath, and it
would record tracks of information in arcs and such as
a stom is called an arcuate recorder and That's a
word I had never encountered before I did the research
for this episode. In fact, the first time I saw
(13:08):
it printed, I thought perhaps I was looking at a
typo and what they meant to say was an accurate recorder.
But no, that meant they meant arquate, and that the
information was being recorded in arcs onto the tape um.
The recording head that Ginsburg's team built was actually the
initial one was actually three heads on a rotating drum,
(13:29):
and it would scan tape that was about two inches
in width or about five centimeters, and the tape would
move past the head at a relatively leisurely thirty inches
per second or seventy six point two centimeters per second,
which is still pretty fast, but nothing like the two
per second of the earlier method. What's more, the rotating
drums speed allowed Ginsburg to record the same amount of
(13:51):
information as he could if the tape were moving at
a blistering two thousand, five hundred inches per second. He
could cramp far more information onto a shorter length of
tape using this methodology. Still, this early prototype produced recordings that,
in Ginsberg's own words, produced and quote almost unrecognizable picture
(14:13):
end quote. The next prototype added another recording head, so
brought the total up to four on the drum, and
with some other technical changes that get a little too
complicated for me to go into in this episode. But
this version had its own problems and at this stage
the project was shelved. Technically, it was shelved for a
second time, and this happened around the summer of nineteen
(14:33):
fifty three, and the project would not officially start up
again in earnest until August nine. However, in that off time,
Ginsburg and others on his team would continue kind of
working on specific problems on the SLY and so they
were able to solve some of the issues. While the
project was officially no longer on the books, Ginsburg was
(14:56):
able to secure approval from management for a small number
of hours to be devoted to another prototype, and so
he and his team built a device that got the
name the Mark one. On September one, nineteen fifty four,
Ginsburg's team demonstrated the Mark one to executives and it
must have gone pretty well because Ampex authorized the project
(15:16):
to get back into full swing officially, and the major
change was how the information was being laid down on
the tape While the earlier prototypes were using that arquit approach,
in which each line of information moved in an arc
across the length of the tape, the new one laid
down the information in straight lines on the tape. Two
more years of refinements would follow until February ninety six.
(15:39):
That's when Ginsburg's team would give a new demo to
thirty Ampex executives, and in that demo, the team used
a new system, this one called the Mark four, to
record a video sequence live at the event. So they
shot video for a couple of minutes. Um they actually
set up a camera and shot video of the people
(16:00):
attending the meeting. Then they rewound the tape and they
fed it through the playback system, and according to Ginsburg,
at the conclusion of the playback, the whole room erupted
with a celebration, so it must have gone pretty darn well.
They followed that up with a demonstration of the Mark
four at the National Association of Broadcasters conference, and it
was a huge hit, and Ampex started to get orders
(16:22):
for its technology, which would change TV production and preservation
and lay the groundwork for home theaters. When we come back,
i'll talk more about that evolution and how the video
tape recorder made its transition to the video cassette recorder.
But first, let's take a quick break. So the video
(16:46):
tape recorder or VTR got real start in n S.
CBS would jump on board first, but other other networks
would join suit, and for about two decades that's where
videotape lived. In the production side, it was very rare
to run into a consumer video tape machine. The systems
(17:08):
cost thousands of dollars when they first came out, like
fifty thou dollars uh, and that was well beyond the
reach of consumers. And the tape was also really expensive
and it was it was like three dollars a foot,
so it was prohibitively expensive for almost everyone. This was
not a consumer device, but a professional production machine. You
(17:29):
wouldn't have one in your own home unless you were
extravagantly wealthy and probably a little bit eccentric. So Ampex
would continue to improve its technology, but other companies also
got into the mix with their own video tape recorders,
and the quest for a consumer device would take a
little longer. You had different companies UH experimenting with different
(17:50):
widths of videotape, different styles of recording heads. Uh, So
you had a lot of different companies all trying to
become the industry leader and to top Ampex. Meanwhile, you
had a company out of the UK called the Nottingham
Electric Valve Company that marketed a device called the tail
Cam in the early nineteen sixties, and this was technically
(18:13):
the first, or at least one of the first home
video recording devices on record. This one was pretty limited.
It could only record about twenty minutes of video per tape,
and it was real to real tape. It was not
a cassette, so you actually had to mount reels on
this device like the old real to real audio recorders.
The quality of the recording wasn't terribly good. The device
(18:35):
itself was a bit of a chore to use, and
on top of it all, it was expensive. So Tellcan
didn't really seem much success and it would fade away,
it wouldn't get market support. According to the website Inventricity,
only two tell Can units are known to exist today.
One of them is in Nottingham and the other one
(18:56):
is in San Francisco. Ampex introduced a real to real
recorder in nineteen sixty three in the United States called
the Signature five, which used two inch tape, so it's
about five centimeters wide. The following year, Phillips would introduce
a different reel to reel video recorder meant for semi
professional use or what we might refer to as the
(19:16):
pro sumer market. It could only record in black and white,
and the tape of the reels measured one inch or
about two point five centimeters in width. And then Sony
introduced the CV twenty twenty, which was another reel to
reel video recorder that used half inch tape. And all
of these were expensive units and the real to real
nature meant they weren't very user friendly. You know, you
(19:38):
still had to feed the tape through the machine and
then uh, get it attached to the secondary reel and
then feed it, you know, play it from there. That
was not easy to do. So like the earlier tel Can,
they didn't get a widespread adoption among consumers. If you
were technically savvy and you had a whole bunch of cash,
(20:02):
then maybe you had one, but otherwise it probably passed
you by. The real to real format had a lot
of drawbacks because the tape, just like film could be
easily damaged by environmental forces. There was nothing protecting the
tape from stuff like dust or fingers or dogs, and
(20:23):
so you could very easily damage the tape and ruin
your recording. Companies were working on prototypes of a form
factor that would greatly simplify the use of a tape,
and one of those was Sony, which had started working
on video cassettes back in nineteen sixty nine and its
research and development department. In nine seventy, Sony, Panasonic, and
(20:45):
JVC arrived at an agreed upon standard for video cassettes,
ensuring that the different companies would create recording and playback
devices as well as cassettes that could work together across
the different companies products. So if you bought a any
video cassette player, then you bought a cassette that was
(21:05):
made by j VC, you could be sure that the
two would work together. In Sony introduced the U Matic,
which is arguably the first video cassette recorder or VCR,
but the name VCR actually comes from a different device,
the Phillips Video Cassette Recorder. That one came out a
couple of months after Sony's. It didn't seem much consumer success,
(21:29):
but lower budget television stations relied on it to record
broadcasts to video and in fact in TV production. The
you Matic would stick around until the nineteen nineties, so
while it didn't become a vague home device, it did
play a very important role in TV production behind the scenes.
A company called c t I introduced another cassette player
(21:51):
called the cartra Vision in nineteen seventy two. It became
the first company to offer pre recorded films for purchase
for the home. So this was the first time you
had a company not just produce a player, but also
make deals with production studios to get licensing for films
or television programs and then to offer them for sale.
(22:14):
So now people had the option to actually own a
copy of a film, making it possible to watch whenever
they wanted. It was a huge, huge deal, right. This
was a breakthrough in approach, but the cart Revision as
a format didn't last very long. It didn't take off,
so while the concept was important, the actual implementation didn't work.
(22:38):
All of those early devices were really expensive and that
contributed to their lack of tractions. So while we started
to see the promise of this technology, it wasn't quite
at the level where it could be commercially viable for
the home consumer. That changed in UH. Sony and j
VC had a little parting of the ways. Had worked
(23:00):
together to create the standard for you Matic, but now
Sony was looking to develop its own proprietary approach for
the home market UH, and so they were both trying
different proprietary approaches at the same time. Sony's version was
the Beta Max format, which was smaller than the u
(23:21):
Matic format. If you had a Pumatic cassette and a
Beta Max cassette side by side, you'd see the Beta
Max cassette was smaller, and it was able to produce
recordings of a comparable quality to you Matic. It wasn't
quite as good, but it was pretty good. It's really close.
Then j v C would follow suit in nineteen seventy
six with the introduction of the VHS format, and thus
(23:43):
began one of the famous format wars that we talked
about in Tech Beta Max versus VHS. It's a story
that we've seen play out lots of different times, and
it's a story we're going to revisit in a future
episode with Blu Ray versus HD DVD Beta mat X
had the edge over VHS when it came to picture quality,
the quality was slightly better. The difference wasn't a dramatic one,
(24:08):
but Beta Max could legitimately claim our picture has higher
resolution than VHS. However, VHS tapes could hold more content
than Beta Max tapes could. Early Beta Max tapes had
a limit of about an hour's worth of material, so
you couldn't even get a full movie on a single
Beta Max cassette. In the early days, VHS could outperform
(24:28):
in that space. With a VHS tape, even an early one,
you could record a whole film onto one cassette. Later
on you would be able to film to record multiple
films on a single cassette. The HS slowly got the
upper hand in the format wars, and by night one,
the VHS format accounted for seventy five of the VCR market.
The Beta Max share would drop continuously at you know
(24:51):
it was that twenty in nine. By night six it
was down to just seven point five percent of the market.
So VHS dominated in the space. But while VHS and
Beta Max were fighting for supremacy, there was another fight
that was boiling regarding the practice of videotaping at home
at all. This one originated in Hollywood. So in nineteen
(25:14):
seventy six, the same year that JVC would debut the
VHS format, the movie studio Universal Pictures filed a copyright
infringement lawsuit against Sony. The argument Universal made was that
just by creating a device capable of recording video images
off of a television, Sony had violated copyright law. Akio Marita,
(25:35):
Sony's founder, had said that the Beta max device allowed
for a time shift approach to television. That's something we'll
talk about again. Upon the development of the digital video recorder,
so the idea was no longer would you have audiences
being dependent upon the broadcast schedule of TV stations. I
don't know if all of you guys remember this. Some
(25:56):
of you young ones may not have ever known a
world like this, but back in the day, we were
completely dependent upon the broadcast schedule of television stations. If
you were not home at eight pm on a Thursday night,
you were not going to see that next episode of
I don't know, cheers um, unless you had to have
(26:17):
happened to have a VCR where you could set it
to record while you were away and then you could
time shift. You could watch the program whenever you wanted
on your schedule. So it was kind of like an
on demand kind of approach, except you had to actually
actively record the show first. But before there were VCRs
that there was no option. You were either home to
watch it or you missed it and that was it.
(26:40):
So Marita's argument was, this is going to give the
consumer far more flexibility in the consumption of entertainment. So
you could leave your home, you set your recorder to
capture a program or a film on television, and then
you can watch it whenever you wanted. It's something we
take for granted now, but this was a brand new
idea in the nineties seventies. It was revolutionary. But Lou
(27:02):
Wasserman of m c A slash Universal had different plans. See,
he had an idea that his company was going to
partner with some other companies on developing a proprietary playback device.
Uh primarily they were going to partner with Phillips and
this device was called disco Vision and would later be
called the Laser Disc. And the plan was to release
(27:23):
content for this device and it would only be able
to play that content back it couldn't record anything, It
could only play back prerecorded material, and that would give
Universal full control of its television and film libraries. They
could say, hey, do you want to see our movies,
Well you can do that, but the only way you
can do it is to go through us, to buy
(27:45):
these proprietary discs that will run on this proprietary hardware
and UH. That way they could have full control of
the situation. Walt Disney Productions would join with Universal in
this lawsuit against uh UH, the Sony, and and they
sought to block all sales of Beta Max machines. Now,
Sony argued that the Beta Max was similar to tape recorders,
(28:09):
which had been deemed a legal product all the way
back in the nineteen sixties. So the U. S. District
Court would hear the case in nineteen seventy nine, and
they ruled in favor of Sony. But then the case
went to an appeals court and the appeals court reversed
the decision in nineteen one. However, at this point, the
VCR was really doing pretty well. VCR sales were picking up,
(28:32):
and the VHS format, which wasn't even Beta Max, was
already ahead of the Sony beta max approach. So even
if the the court had argued that there needs to
be a block on beta max sales, VHS was already winning. However,
the case would continue through the court system, finally making
(28:53):
its way all the way to the United States Supreme
Court in four and the Supreme Court reversed the appeals
court decision and ruled in favor for Sony that settled
the matter officially saying these devices do not violate copyright law.
By half of all American households would own a VCR.
(29:14):
As for the movie studios well, Even as the case
was making its way through the court, it became clear
that video cassettes actually represented a new line of revenue
generation that it wasn't going to hurt the studios. It
could actually really help them. Studios could dive into their
back catalogs of movies and sell video cassettes to consumers
(29:35):
movies that would otherwise just sit in a storage facility,
maybe like an old salt mine. They could actually earn money. Again.
Even Walt Disney Productions would jump on board, though that
was largely due to a change in leadership because a
guy named Michael Eisner became CEO of the company, and
Eisner led the studio to release several of their classic
films on video cassette, and before long, Disney Movies captured
(29:59):
something like seven out of the top ten best selling
video tapes of all time, so it was a very
much a winning strategy for Walt Disney, even though earlier
the company had opposed the technology. That same year was
when the videotape industry actually overtook the film industry in revenue,
(30:19):
and it turned out the fears of piracy were largely misplaced.
Just like audio cassettes, most VCRs can only record at
the same speed as the playback of a source, so
if you're trying to tape a two hour movie, it
would take you two hours to tape it. It wasn't
the sort of thing that the average person could do
to just churn out pirated copies of videos. Though if
(30:41):
you got your hands on some semi professional equipment, you
could do it at a faster clip. You could reproduce
video tapes faster than your your you know, store brand VCR,
but that was an investment most folks weren't able to make.
So it was possible to generate, you know, lots of
of unlicensed copies of a film, but only if you
(31:04):
had access to this equipment. If you were just using
two VCRs at home, it was such a painstakingly long
process that it didn't make much sense now. In the
early days, prerecorded video cassettes were really expensive, like if
you wanted to go out and buy a movie on
video cassette, you were showing out some big bucks. For example,
when Columbia Pictures made Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters available for purchase on VHS,
(31:30):
each copy costs the princely sum of eighty dollars. The
company sold more than four hundred thousand copies of the
film at that price, And if you want to adjust
it for inflation in today's cash, that's nearly a hundred
ninety dollars for a copy of a movie. And that's
just for one film. Yikes, switching gears for a second.
(31:50):
The birth of the video cassette also led to the
birth of another industry that a video rental. It's pretty
much agreed that the first, honest to goodness real video
rental store was created by George Atkinson in nineteen seventy
seven in Los Angeles, California. A guy named Andre Blair
had negotiated with studios to license the rights for a
few dozen films to be recorded to videotape for sale,
(32:13):
and Atkinson bought up some copies of those films that
that Blay had licensed, and then he started to offer
those up as rentals. Atkinson actually faced some opposition for
this business, with entertainment companies threatening to sue him, but
he researched copyright law and he saw that he had
the right, as the owner of a copy of a
work to rent or resell his copy. He wasn't doing
(32:35):
anything illegal, he wasn't duplicating the films, He was just
renting the copy he happened to own. Other video rental
stores opened in different parts of the country, and by
night one the owners of several of these stores or
small chains of stores got together to form an industry
organization they called the Video Software Dealers Association, and the
(32:58):
purpose of that organization was to help TechEd video rental
stores from litigation and changes to what is called the
first sale doctrine, as the concept that says a copyright
holder can't stop someone from lending out or reselling their
legally acquired copy of a copyrighted work without those protections.
Stuff like libraries would cease to exist because of legal challenges.
(33:19):
But because this doctrine is in place, I can do
stuff like by a VHS copy of Tron, and later
on I can sell it at a garage sale without
worrying about getting sued for it or whether if I
am sued for it, I'll win. Now, one thing that
I couldn't do is I wouldn't be allowed to make
copies of that Tron tape and then sell those copies
to other people. The right to reproduce a copyrighted work
(33:42):
falls to the owner of the copyright. The most I
could do is I can make a backup copy of
the Tron tape that I own myself, and I'm not
selling it. I'm not lending it out. I make a
backup copy and I put it away in a safe place,
just in case my original tape breaks or something else
goes wrong. Backup copies fall under the category of fair
(34:02):
use and copyright law, meaning it's a fair use of
the copyrighted work. So there's some fine lines to walk
in this arena. And developments and technology are what made
these these ideas necessary, And the same thing holds true
for record albums and other stuff. Like if I owned
a vinyl album, I would be allowed to transfer that
to audio cassette in order for me to have a
(34:24):
backup copy of that vinyl album should something happen to it.
But I couldn't make copies of it over and over
and over again and then give it away or sell
it to friends. That would be a violation of copyright.
This is also going to become important when we move
to digital music, and we'll see that in future episodes. So,
the video cassette was changing the business of entertainment and
it allowed for the establishment of video rental companies. The
(34:47):
men that filmmakers and entertainers had a new market they
could exploit. This is also when enterprising individuals started making
content specifically for the home video market. Some we're making
stuff like self help videos or exercise videos, or made
for video films and shows. Stuff that couldn't get distribution
in theaters or on television could find a home on
(35:07):
video cassette. And boy, if you've ever gone through the
bargain bins that have had video cassettes in them, you've
probably seen some examples of this stuff that you otherwise
never would have heard of. And the late nineteen eighties,
studios began to drop the price of prerecorded video cassettes,
with tapes dropping below thirty dollars a title, and the
video cassette era boomed, with VCRs becoming a common component
(35:30):
in homes around the world. It would also set the
stage for future technologies like the DVD player and later
still the HD DVD player and the Blu ray player.
Those technologies rely on a completely different approach to recording media,
but the business side of selling and renting copies and
the consumer relationship with the technology would be similar to
that of the VCR and the video cassette. It also
(35:51):
helped establish practices and precedents that would be important upon
the introduction of devices like digital video recorders. So for now,
let's shift not in time but in top So when
we come back, I'll talk a bit about a different
technology that would displace the audio cassette in the consumer
music world, the compact disc. But first let's take another
quick break. While the audio cassette, sometimes called the compact cassette,
(36:20):
was gearing up to take over the top spot in
consumer audio from the vinyl record album, its successor was
already in development, the compact disc, which would be able
to preserve music and a high fidelity much higher than
what audio cassettes could do at the time, and with
proper care, could last much longer than audio cassettes was
(36:40):
starting to take shape. Interestingly, the compact disc kind of
rose out of a failure, namely that the aforementioned laser disc.
So while magnetic tape stored information using magnetism, laser discs
and later CDs and DVDs and blu rays and h
D DVDs used optical storage uh optical storage, meaning that
(37:02):
it was all done with light. So a physicist named
James Russell pioneered this technology all the way back in
the nineteen sixties. He's a brilliant physicist and also a
lover of music. That led him kind of down this
pathway to determine how could he create a new form
of storage media. He was wanting to make something that
(37:24):
would preserve music better than the vinyl form factor. See,
he was frustrated because the vinyl album methodology means you're
going to be wearing out your records if you listen
to them a lot, because you're using a physical stylus
or needle. It's making its way through the grooves on
the record, and as it does so, it starts to
(37:47):
wear down those grooves a little bit. So if you
listen to the same vinyl album enough times, you're going
to negatively affect the quality of the sound you get
when you play it back. It just starts to wear down.
So he said, we need some way to play back
music that doesn't require physical contact between the media and
the playback device. There needs to be some way where
(38:08):
whatever the sensor is that's picking up the information isn't
directly touching the actual surface that holds that information. He
determined that if you converted music into binary data. In
other words, if you encoded the music in zeros and
ones the information of computers in bits, and you did
(38:30):
that to describe everything about the music, you know, all
the frequencies, all the volumes, you could store this music
digitally onto a medium. By the way, this is essentially
the idea that Ada Lovelace had way back in the
eighteen hundreds when she was working with Charles Babbage. She
(38:52):
had suggested that mathematics could be used to represent all
sorts of things, including music, and that's essentially what Russell
was saying as well. He was specifically talking about binary
whereas uh Lovelace did not quite get to that point,
but Russell was saying, no, we could. We could totally
describe music in bits and be able to encode it
(39:15):
in that way, and then using the proper decoding, you
could decipher the information and replicate the performance. So if
you use light to pick up this digital information, you
wouldn't need physical contact with the recorded surface of a
piece of media. So he filed for a patent in
nineteen sixty six for what he called the Digital to
(39:36):
Optical Recording and Playback System, and he received the patent
in nineteen seventy. Russell used a photo sensitive platter and
he programmed it by making alternating dark and light bits
measuring about a micron in size. So to play back
what was recorded on the platter, he used a laser
(39:57):
to scan it, and the laser was register during the
tiny pits on the platter. Those pits represented the binary
patterns on the platter. So these pits were telling the
system whether it was a zero or one. And you
had some very nice mirrors to reflect any light that
was being picked up, and that was what was indicating
(40:18):
whether or not it was a pit. Or just a
regular plateau on the platter. This became sort of the
basis for the laser disc. Universal and Phillips would license
the pattern from Russell, but they departed from Russell's plan. See,
Russell wanted to record in pure digital. He wanted to
convert everything into binary information. Everything was supposed to be bits.
(40:40):
The laser disc went a slightly different way. So the
laser disc would record information on a platter on a
disc in the form of little pits, just like Russell's vision,
but the encoding was analog, not digital, so instead of
it being a representation of zeros and ones, the shape
and the length of the pits indicated the analog information
(41:03):
that was encoded onto the disc. So you could argue
the laser disc is mostly an analog format, which it
gets really confusing because you're using an optical approach, but
it is technically, at least in some definitions, and analog medium. Now,
to get into the real reasons why this is so
(41:23):
would require a much more in depth look at the
laser disc, and honestly, I don't have the time to
do that in this episode, so I'll save that for
a future episode. I'll do a full episode just about
the development of the laser disc in a future episode
of tech Stuff, But it was a fundamentally different approach
to what Russell was working on this. The pits on
(41:44):
the laser disc look kind of like the ones you
would see on a c D or a DVD or
a Blu ray if you had a microscope to really
look at them, but they didn't represent digital bits of
information in the same way. All right, So back to Russell.
I want to take a second here to point out
that russ really was a genius still is. It's not
just that he came up with a new method of
(42:05):
storing data onto a medium. He was also able to
figure out how to encode audio in binary data so
that it could be decoded and played back, and it
took years of hard work and research to pull it
all off. Digital recording is different from analog, and I've
done episodes about this as well, so I'm not going
to go into great detail, but I do want to
(42:26):
kind of address this for a little bit. With analog,
you've got a continuous input signal, right, It's like if
you were to look at a wave, it's just a
steady wave that is unbroken. Binary is a little bit different.
With binary, you sample an incoming signal. UH sampling is
(42:47):
kind of like taking snapshots of a signal, and the
more samples you take per given unit of time, the
greater the resolution of your recording. I'm going to give
you a quick analogy this. This is just a sort
of visualize while I'm talking about. So let's say you're
standing outside of a room and the door to that
room is currently closed. It's a very heavy door. You
(43:09):
can open the door, but shortly after you open it,
you have to let go and it'll slam shut. So
when you open the door, you can hear what's going
on inside the room, but when the door is closed,
you can't make out what's going on. And because the
door will slam shut shortly after you open it, you
only get a moment to hear something. So you open
the door quickly and you hear a lot of people
(43:30):
being loud, but you only hear it for that instant
before the door shuts and you can't hear anything else.
And at that moment, you can't really draw any conclusions
about what you just heard. You just heard people being loud.
You don't know if they're happy or they're angry, or
they're scared, or they're just trying to talk over each other.
So you open the door again. And the more times
(43:51):
you're able to open the door, the better an idea
you have of what's going on inside that room. And
if you're able to open up the door very quickly,
like right after it closes, it could be almost like
you're hearing what's going on in the room uninterrupted. Of course,
from an outside observer, you would look like you were
quite eccentric as you kept on opening a door that
kept shutting on you. Digital sampling is a little bit
(44:13):
like that, though it gets much more technical as you
might imagine. But the digital nature of processing the sound
opened up a new battleground between audio files and people
just wanted easy access to music. I'll touch on that
a bit more in the next episode. The LaserDisc gathered
a devoted audience of film lovers, but the expense of
the devices and the limited video library meant and didn't
(44:37):
get widespread adoption the man, You know, LaserDiscs were pretty
darn neat. You typically had to flip them over to
watch a whole movie. One side might hold thirty or
sixty minutes worth of materials, so they had a limited capacity.
But they also introduced other stuff that would become standard
in future formats, stuff like extra features which you wouldn't
get in a typical VHS tape. You know, you buy
(44:58):
a VHS tape of a movie, you get the movie.
You buy a laser disc of the movie, you might
get some commentary, you might get extra scenes, you might
get a lot of stuff, and you could jump around
and watch different scenes through essentially the random access approach.
But you couldn't do that with VHS. You had to
just watch at whatever point the tape was at. You
could fast forward or rewind, but you couldn't just jump
(45:22):
to a chapter or something. You could do that with
laser discs. So this was stuff that would carry over
into the DVD and Blu ray eras and it opened
up new opportunities and entertainment. So again we see how
the evolution of technology would change the actual business of entertainment.
Phillips initially was ready to say sayannara to the optical
(45:42):
storage format after the laser disc failed to win out
over the cassette based video formats that were already on
the market, but eventually the company, along with Sony came
around to the idea for audio discs, and the compact
disc was born. Phillips unveiled a prototype of the compact
disc in teen seventy nine, but it would be a
few years before the format was standardized. For one thing,
(46:04):
Sony allegedly demanded that a single compact disc would need
to be able to hold an entire performance of Beethoven's
Ninth Symphony. So, if you've ever wondered why a standard
c D is four point seven inches or twelve centimeters
in diameter, allegedly it's because of Beethoven. The duration of
Beethoven's symphony depends upon the arrangement, but typically the Ninth
(46:29):
Symphony tends to last somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy minutes. However,
they were looking for the longest version of the symphony
recorded to make that the standard, and it clocked in
at around seventy four minutes. And to hold that much audio,
the CD would have to be twelve centimeters in diameter,
and there we have it. Phillips and Sony established the
standards for CDs in nineteen eighty, with Phillips showing off
(46:51):
the first production model meant for consumers two years later,
and according to the BBC, the first two commercial c
D presses ever were a recording of Strauss's Alpine Symphony
and the immortal album The Visitors by Abba Super. When
the CD got started in the early nineteen eighties, it
wouldn't really start to be a threat to the cassette
(47:13):
until the nineteen nineties. So in our next episode will
continue our look at the c D and its impact
on the entertainment industry, including more about the audio file
objection I mentioned earlier. Will also look into the birth
of DVDs and their successors and lay the ground for
the digital file era. I hope you guys are enjoying
this series. I really like looking at this sort of
(47:35):
big picture stuff, this evolution of technology and how that
changed not just the business, but are very thoughts around entertainment,
how our attitudes about entertainment have changed as the technology
has enabled different ways to consume that that entertainment um
to me. This is what I love most about tech stuff,
(47:57):
is this relationship between technology industry and our our society.
So I hope you guys are enjoying this, and if
you're not, don't worry. Pretty soon we're gonna be off
this topic and talking about all sorts of other stuff.
If you have your own suggestions of what I should
be covering next, why not send me an email the
addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com or
(48:20):
pop on over to tech stuff podcast dot com. That's
our website where you'll find the archive of all of
our older episodes, plus you'll find links to our social
media presence. You can reach out to me on Facebook
or on Twitter and I'll be happy to hear your
suggestions there as well. And also don't forget to head
on over to our store and if you purchase something
over there, it goes to help the show and we
(48:40):
greatly appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again really soon.
Hex Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How
Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit
the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. Three
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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