RCA was a pioneer in Telecommunications in the early 1900s, inventing a number of important and innovational technologies. Some things like home radio, color TV, and even NBC were created by them. If they didn’t create it, they at least played a role in the project. Some notable examples of that were television, VHS, and ABC. Once the seventies came, though, RCA had fallen short of expectations on a number of things. Eventually, RCA had to make a decision. But first, let’s backtrack.
Years before, in 1964, RCA knew their invention of color TV was going to drop in sales. What was the next revolutionary product? They thoughtthey knew. See, nobody had an option on what to watch outside of the 3-4 channels they got on-air. What if they could make a medium capable of storing TV signals with enough time stored for a full-length movie to watch later, whenever? Tape (at the time) was way too expensive and way too hard to manufacture for that to become viable in the near future, so what could it be? Wait, I got it!
Phonograph records had been a mainstay of music for decades so what if they could make a record capable of storing a movie on it? It would be so much cheaper, so much easier to manufacture than tape, and had been a tested concept with music! Even if television signals held much more data, they could figure something out. Surely this won’t take that long.
RCA would probably regret saying that come the seventies. By the time 1978 rolled around, RCA was not in the greatest financial point possible, and the project wasn’t close to being released. VHS was becoming a norm for home video at the moment, and many delays to this project finally called for a decision. All of the managers for the VideoDisc project were asked to vote on if they proceeded with the project, or just gave up. Majority votes went to proceeding, so they persisted. But why?
By the mid seventies, RCA went through a number of failed or abandoned projects, and the VideoDisc was sort of the last man standing. If they didn’t follow through with this project, they were doomed for sure. It was looking less and less promising that the VideoDisc would be a successful product, but showing some work is better than nothing. Once VHS won over BetaMax in the videotape format war (ironically, it was RCA’s call, after backing VHS with Matsushita), chances for the VideoDisc’s success plummeted (and arguably ceased to exist).
Once 1981 rolled around, RCA’s SelectaVision VideoDisc was finally released. It was worse than a failure. It failed to gain marketshare, so 1982 came and RCA tried to correct their mistakes, but failed once more. At the end of the day, the product was going to be a fail, unless they released it before tape became viable. VHS had already won. VideoDisc came nowhere close to how capable and trustworthy VHS (or even BetaMax) was.
Finally, in 1984, RCA gave up. CEDs (the actual discs) were to be sold for three more years, but players were finished. GE scooped the company up in 1986, eventually destroying it altogether (and ending the three year grace period). Now RCA is a name-brand only company, selling bad quality phones, TVs, and even microwaves.
What does this have to do with innovation? Great question, me! See, RCA wasn’t innovating for years (even decades…). All of the failed products that they made under 3 new CEOs ruined their reputation, and you could say America forgot them. They were such a great leader in consumer electronics from the very start, but the key to a prosperous business is innovation. If you stop innovating, what do you show for your brand? Nothing lasts forever, soon the hype’ll die down. But RCA already knew that. What RCA was missing was teamwork. Let me explain.
Back when RCA stood for the Radio Corporation of America, David Sarnoff (founder) made two divisions of the company. The laboratories based out of Princeton and the consumer division based out of Indianapolis. In 5 words, they never got along well. There was always corporate politics between them, eventually leading to the fate of the VideoDisc. At first, the laboratories were responsible for the development of the VideoDisc for most of its production time. They never got anything substantial done. When the development was handed to the consumer division, it was finished in fractions of the time the labs tried to do it. They focused on what they needed to do to make it work. Not what they could do to make it work. Even if the labs took control, though, they might’ve been able to pull it off if they hadn’t forgotten how to innovate. The labs forgot what still was remotely possible and tried out things like holograms that were just insane for the time period of development. So the VideoDisc was handed off to the “work with what’s available” consumer division. If the labs somehow worked with the consumer division and kept innovating from the beginning, I bet we could’ve been holding RCA-branded discs in our hands, ready for playback, in 1975.
“His Master’s Voice” is a public domain image.