Television on a Disk

Monday, Sep. 18, 1972

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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 electronicsRCA, 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 systemsSony'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 yearnearly 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 $500about 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.