Television on a Disk

For years cassette television has been an idea whose time has almost come. Video visionaries have been promising that some day soon no living room will be complete without a videotape player and recorder, along with a library of cassettes. Some companies have been putting movie classics on cassettes, as well as cooking lessons, travelogues and courses for salesmen and doctors. Many of the biggest companies in consumer electronics--RCA, CBS, Sony, Telefunken, Decca, Ampex, Avco --have poured fortunes into developing cassettes or special player attachments for home television sets that, any day now, would revolutionize TV.

So far, only two video cassette systems--Sony's U-matic ($1,395) and Cartridge Television's Cartrivision ($ 1,350)--have made it to the showroom floor in the U.S. Both are combinations of TV sets and cassette-player attachments, but they are too expensive for the mass market. Sony has sold some 15,000 U-matics in the U.S. since their introduction last year--nearly all of them to schools, hospitals, businesses and other institutions. Last month Ford Motor Co. bought 4,000 for use in its dealer-education program. Since June Cartrivision has been offered for sale in some Sears, Macy's and Montgomery Ward stores, but only a few hundred at most have been sold. Cartrivision's makers hope to have a $700 model available next May that can be attached to an ordinary television set.

One of the brightest spots on the home screen appeared last week when N.V. Philips' Gloeilampenfabrieken, the Dutch electronics giant, demonstrated a new video system. It consists of a device the size of a phonograph turntable, which attaches to an ordinary TV set. Instead of book-sized cassettes, it uses lightweight aluminum-coated disks that resemble long-playing records. Philips' scientists predict that the set attachment and the disks could be mass-produced within three years.

The company's marketing specialists anticipate a list price of $400 to $500--about the cost of a color TV --for the attachment. Prerecorded disks would not be priced much higher than phonograph LPs and would contain 90 minutes of programming (45 minutes on each side). Video-tape cassettes now sell for about $35 and contain an hour's viewing time.

Other companies have been experimenting with disks, but none have yet squeezed more than 20 minutes viewing time onto each side. In order to produce the high frequency signals needed to create a video image, the disks have to spin up to 1,500 revolutions per minute; at that speed a needle whips through them too fast. The Philips system, developed by Video Research Chief Hajo Meyer, Dr. Piet Kramer and their 25-person team, uses a helium-neon laser beam instead of a needle. And instead of grooves, Philips' shiny aluminum disks have millions of microscopic "pits" that produce variations in the intensity of the laser beam's reflection as the disk spins. A photodetector translates the reflection into electrical impulses, which are then fed to the TV screen. The color is truer than that of any image transmitted over the air from a TV station. The disk could also carry stereo sound along with the picture.

Kramer's twelve-inch-wide platters have another important advantage over video tape: they can freeze an image on the screen. A viewer can read a book on his TV set and turn pages at his own speed; a teacher can show a recorded lecture to her art class and let the image of Michelangelo's David linger on the screen while she digresses on Renaissance political thought; a golfer can stop Jack Nicklaus' swing just at the point where his own club usually goes awry. Using disks instead of tape does have a disadvantage; a video fan cannot make his own recordings. Both the Sony U-matic and the Cartrivision system can be sold with their own cameras for home taping, for at least $250 extra. On the other hand, most companies offer cassettes that do not work on a competitor's player--a situation reminiscent of the record-speed war that stymied the growth of the recording industry in the early 1950s.

Even the most optimistic cassette-TV executive concedes that it will be at least three years before a large consumer video market can develop. When it does, it will be worth waiting for. In the U.S. alone, more families have television sets than bathtubs. The entire world is a well-tubed market for video tapes, disks, players and recorders in what could become a multibillion-dollar industry.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.