Johnny Carson, Watch Your Ass... There's a Revolution Going on

with video cassettes here and video discs just around the corner, it's only a matter of time before blockbuster films premiere in your pad

This year and next, technology is destined to catch up with the family television set. The wasteland is going to become a wonderland, with the small screen undergoing as many combinations and permutations as the once-lowly phonograph did when research and development transformed it into today's quadraphonic marvel.

Television's possibilities will soon be unlimited, with the viewer able to do everything but beam up to the Enterprise. As of right now, you're no longer chained to the time slots dictated by the networks nor forced to choose between All in the Family and the Monday-night movie if they're scheduled at the same time. You can tape one while you watch the other, then watch the taped show at your leisure.

And in the very near future, if you don't like any of the scheduled shows, you can be your own video-disc jockey and spin the program platter of your choice--uncut, uncensored and sans commercials. But that's only for openers. When officials in the industry blue-sky it, they talk in terms of video "books" illustrated with film clips, commercials "printed" in video-disc form and bound into your favorite magazine (play the page and watch A. J. Foyt test-drive Detroit's latest), and even such fascinating possibilities as a Playboy Interview live and perhaps the Playmate of the Month in living color (see Think Tank, Playboy, June 1976).

Television has been hypnotized before by its own picture tube, with officials announcing as imminent developments that never quite made it to the market place. There have been any number of television and high-fidelity components that worked well when hand-crafted in the laboratory but that turned out to be lemons when they came off the assembly line (if they could be mass-produced at all).

How far off the wall are industry spokesmen this time? If you can believe Wall Street, not very. Entertainment stocks are some of the hottest on the big board and one of the major reasons is what's been happening in the video field. Insiders are well aware that your TV set is about to become the center of a home-entertainment complex as versatile and intricate as the rig of the most enthusiastic audio buff.

Nor are all the miracles due five years from now. Just coming onto the market are video-cassette tape recorders that will enable you to break the logjam of network programing and also solve the problem of inconvenient broadcast hours. Sony, Panasonic and JVC are among the major manufacturers producing cassette units that need only to be plugged in and have their output leads attached to the antenna of your TV set. Slip in a blank video cassette and you're ready to record.

Two programs on the air at the same time and you can't make up your mind which to watch? Turn on one and record the other for viewing later. There's a late-night movie you want to catch, but you're beat and you have to be at the office early in the morning? Set the timer and tape it--then watch it the following evening, when the night's programing consists of reruns and pilots that never made it off the ground.

Perhaps the most widely distributed of the recorders (now available in 24 major markets and due for national distribution by December) is Sony's Betamax, a $1260 video-cassette recorder with its own tuner. It has most of the standard features of an audio-cassette recorder--fast forward, rewind and eject--with a digital clock timer as a $40 optional accessory. Video cassettes are inserted in much the same manner as audio cassettes; operation is also similar to that of an audio machine, even to the familiar bank of piano-key switches. The cassette uses half-inch tape in an hour or half-hour format. You can build up a library of features or erase the tape and use the same cassette over and over. (Sony's cassette K-60 sells for $15.95; cassette K-30 is $11.95.)

Sony also makes a $2295 all-in-one unit, combining a 19-inch Trinitron set with a Betamax unit. One of the advantages is that the unit has provisions for attaching a camera (an additional $395) via a 15-foot umbilical cable so the owner can take home movies (in black and white only).

The JVC and Panasonic models are both precision instruments, use three-quarter-inch tape for improved picture quality and have a number of exciting features for the video freak. The JVC CR-6300U ($1960) has a built-in timer, stop-action playback capability, two audio channels for stereo record and playback, plus facilities for dubbing another sound track while playing back a previously recorded feature. The Panasonic model NV-2125 ($1775) has automatic rewind, automatic repeat mode, automatic search ability, dual sound tracks for stereo recording and an optional clock timer. Sixty-minute cassettes for these two units cost $35 each. Shorter cassettes at lower cost are also available.

If the video-cassette recorders sound suspiciously like their audio counterparts, the similarity is undoubtedly intentional. The controls are remarkably similar and the units themselves look like oversized audio models. Be aware, however, that while the Panasonic and JVC cassettes are compatible, the Sony half-inch-tape cassette is not compatible with either. As yet, there are few prerecorded video cassettes available, though Time-Life is marketing some, primarily for the educational field. To rectify this situation, Sony has just joined with Paramount to form a new company--Sony/Paramount Home Entertainment Center--which, by the end of 1977, hopes to be distributing nationally a variety of features, including recent flicks.

The major advantage of video cassettes over video discs is the same that audio cassettes have over phonograph records: You can record off the air and you can also erase and use the same cassette repeatedly. Another advantage is simply that video-cassette recorders are available right now--and video discs and their players are not.

But the market debut of video discs is close at hand and when they do appear, the field of communications will never be the same. And at least one of the major brands of video discs will have capabilities that neither tape nor records now have.

The major contenders for the videodisc market are SelectaVision, a development by RCA, and the Philips/MCA Videodisc System, a joint venture by MCA, the parent company of Universal Pictures, and North American Philips, which is affiliated with NV Philips, the Netherlands electronic firm that developed the audio cassette. Spokesmen for both systems claim the price of their playback units will be around $500--far under that of video-cassette recorders--and that of the discs will be around ten dollars.

But though disc and recorder in both systems will look somewhat alike and will be in the same price range, there the similarity ends. The systems operate in dramatically different ways.

Already being tested in the market on a continuous basis is SelectaVision, on which RCA claims to have spent millions of dollars in research. The unit is reportedly easy to manufacture, uses off-the-shelf parts and is "reliable"--meaning, presumably, that it will require few trips to the repair shop.

Since the players are easy to make, RCA claims that the only holdup lies in the discs themselves--and it's currently tooling up a plant to deliver 6,000,000 two-sided discs annually. When will we see both disc and player in stores? RCA has plans for regional marketing in 1977.

The SelectaVision disc and player will be comfortably familiar to everybody. The disc looks much like an ordinary phonograph record, except for the large center hole and iridescent surface. It's pressed of vinyl (and vacuum coated with a thin layer of metal), has grooves on both sides and will be read by a sapphire-and-metal stylus that will physically ride the grooves and pick off the signal, much as a needle and cartridge tracks the grooves of a phonograph record. The playing time will be 30 minutes to a side, with the disc good for more than 500 plays. The stylus has a life expectancy of 300 or more playing hours before it has to be changed.

So much for facts, figures and similarities. But there are a number of important differences between the SelectaVision system and your home record player. Rather than a needle that mechanically tracks the squiggles of an audio record's grooves, SelectaVision uses a capacitance pickup that reads a series of tiny slots in the bottom of the grooves. The grooves themselves are far narrower than those of, a regular phonograph record--there are some 5555 to the inch--and the disc revolves at 450 rpm, more than ten times the familiar 33 1/3.

Like phonograph records, however, the discs are susceptible to damage by handling. Fingerprints, dirt and dust will cause dropouts in the picture on the screen, though RCA claims several plays will effectively clean the disc.

The Philips/MCA Videodisc System and its Disco-Vision video discs also have a superficial similarity to the phonograph record and its player. The disc is the same size and roughly the same thickness (concluded on page 214)Revolution Going On(continued from page 140) as an LP (though there are versions so thin they could be bound into books or magazines) and they also revolve in a player--at a rate of 1800 rpm.

The discs have an indefinite life, because no stylus ever physically touches them. They're read by a low-wattage laser whose light beam is either reflected or scattered (hence, no reflection) by a series of microscopic bumps on an aluminized playing surface. This surface is coated with transparent plastic in the disc's manufacture so the disc is almost impervious to handling--fingerprints and surface dust are also out of the focal plane of the laser beam, so they cause no degradation in either image or sound.

What we have, in short, is a disc that will last forever and whose handling is not critical. But the surprises don't stop there. Since the disc is never physically touched by a stylus, it suddenly acquires many of the capabilities of tape. You can have the equivalent of fast forward or rewind (granted, you mechanically accomplish the same thing when you cue the tonearm in an audio record player), but you also have slow motion, instant replay, frame-by-frame readout or freeze-frame--hold one frame of film on the screen for as long as you wish. (Every revolution of the disc constitutes one frame of pictures; in the freeze-frame mode, the beam continues to read the same frame in that revolution.)

At 1800 rpm and 30 minutes to the side, with each revolution the equivalent of a single frame, the Disco-Vision video disc can project a total of 54,000 separate frames. Furthermore, since in the freeze-frame mode each frame is numbered in the upper lefthand corner of the screen, you can visually search for any specific frame. There are plans for a remote unit whereby you can dial any desired frame and have it flashed onto the screen.

In other words, you could, if you wished, put the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica on a 12-inch disc and read the pages on your television screen, probably using remote dialing to index the pages you wanted.

The applications are almost endless--highlights of past Olympics, interviews with celebrities such as Muhammad Ali or David Bowie, instruction manuals (have Emerson Fittipaldi show you how to fix your Porsche), art lectures where you can catch the greats at work, or even the Sears catalog, all in living color.

Both SelectaVision and the Philips/MCA system are now coming down to the wire. Those industry spokesmen in RCA's corner claim that the RCA unit is easier to manufacture, less space age in its technology and, hence, more amenable to production-line techniques and less expensive to make and market. John Findlater, president of MCA Disco-Vision, denies this, claiming that inexpensive, low-powered lasers (the heart of the space-age unit) are in wide use throughout the country, including supermarket check-out counters. He argues that complex optical systems are used routinely in mass-produced cameras and that the rest of the Philips/MCA player is made from components just as much off the shelf as RCA's unit. He claims they can hold the price to a reasonable level and suggests that the unit's random access--the ability to freeze any frame of your choice for as long as you wish--along with the other features, will be well worth any possible price differential.

In brief, Philips/MCA claims it can make just as cheap and just as reliable a unit as RCA can--and one that is enormously more flexible.

Who will win the video-disc war? Only time will tell, though some in the industry predict that each unit will find its specific usage, much as did LP and 45-rpm records. Unanswered are two questions that nag both Philips/MCA and RCA: The assumption is that the most popular discs will be of movies. The latest and the best. PG, R, X--and pure porn.

But will people really pay $10 to $20 for their own three- or four-record set of, say, Jaws or The Sting? The videodisc people are betting that a lot of people will. Why go out to a noisy theater with an hour waiting line when, for about the same amount of money--if you include the parking fee--you and your date can see the same movie while curled up on the couch?

Which leaves the final question, to which nobody has an answer. LPs are made for repeat listening; you can listen to music while cooking, reading, talking and entertaining. But who wants to see the same movie more than once?

Nobody knows for sure, though perhaps the success of old films on TV (and at the theater) and the fanatic loyalty of Sergeant Bilko, I Love Lucy and Star Trek fans hint at the answer.

One thing for sure; if video discs are accepted in the market place, the field of video fidelity will blossom overnight. There will be sight-and-sound salons, magazines devoted to bringing you the latest product information and small, technologically minded companies that will develop their own, superior versions of optical readout systems, no doubt using advanced lasers and ultrafine scanning.

Will we one day remember--with nostalgia--when the state of the art consisted of an Advent VideoBeam set (see The Big Picture, Playboy, November 1974), JVC, Sony and Panasonic video-cassette recorders, RCA's SelectaVision and Philips/MCA's Videodisc unit? The industry can't wait.

Neither can we.

Picture above (Shown here on a Zenith Chromacolor II) and on preceding page copyright © 1976 by Paramount Pictures Corporation. All Rights Reserved.