Electronic Video Recording

~ the obituary ~

The Motorola Teleplayer had a carrying handle on the top of it and weighed fifty pounds. That single detail explains most of what happened to Electronic Video Recording, because it tells you the people building it still thought they were making a home appliance long after the object on the bench had stopped being one. It was sold instead to schools and to company training departments, at a price that works out to something near five thousand dollars in today's money, and it could not record.

CBS announced EVR on 27 August 1967. The man behind it was Peter Carl Goldmark of CBS Laboratories, who had already given the company the long-playing record and its doomed mechanical color television system, and who was by then the closest thing American broadcasting had to a house inventor. The idea was to put a whole television program into a cartridge you could hand to somebody, at a moment when the only way to see a program was to be in front of a set when it went out.

Underneath, it was photography rather than magnetics. A 750-foot strip of 8.75 millimeter film with no sprocket holes sat on a seven-inch spool inside a plastic cartridge, and the picture had been written onto it by an electron beam rather than a lens. The player pulled the film past a flying-spot scanner, which read the frames with a beam of light and turned them back into a video signal for an ordinary television. Two rows of monochrome frames ran side by side down the strip, so a cartridge held about fifty minutes in black and white. For color, the second row carried the color information instead of a second program, which halved what you got.

The name is where the whole thing comes apart. Electronic Video Recording recorded nothing. Mastering a cartridge needed an electron beam machine in a CBS facility, so what you bought was a playback device with a library attached, and the library was whatever CBS had licensed. Every customer for this was being asked to pay industrial money for the right to watch someone else's catalog in a room they already owned.

None of this reached the country I grew up in, and the reason is not distance so much as sequence. EVR was answering a question that a household has to be rich in television before it thinks to ask. You need years of watching whatever is broadcast before choosing what plays becomes a thing you want badly enough to buy hardware for. Turkey in 1970 had one state channel and most of a decade to go before a second. The appetite EVR was built for showed up here later, and when it did the answer waiting was a VCR you could tape off the air with.

~ the case file ~

~ fifty pounds and a handle ~

Motorola built the player, a machine called the Teleplayer, and made roughly two hundred of them. In 1967 the press coverage had quoted a target price around $270 for the home unit, which was optimistic to the point of fiction. What shipped in 1970 was a heavy grey box aimed at institutions, and as part of the CBS arrangement Motorola agreed to supply the transport and the cathode ray tube to any other licensee who wanted to build one, which is how the format was supposed to spread. Rank Bush Murphy took the license for the United Kingdom.

Reviewers liked it. The picture off film was very good, better than the broadcast tape formats of the day, and CBS also sold a professional version called BEVR for stations that wanted the quality. That version was overtaken almost immediately by magnetic tape, which is the pattern for the entire product: EVR was never beaten on picture, only on everything a customer actually does with a machine.

~ what cbs put on it ~

A playback format lives or dies on catalog, and CBS knew it. The company bought the rights to fifteen hundred old 20th Century Fox films for EVR release and licensed further programming from the BBC and from Mondadori in Italy. In 1970 the format was even trialed as a delivery layer for a proposed United States government mixed media network, which is the sort of contract that keeps a format alive in the absence of consumers.

The commercial side went to business, not to living rooms. The surviving cartridge price lists from 1970 are addressed to corporate customers, with titles from Ford and from Shell Oil in the catalog, training material rather than entertainment. That is what EVR actually was by the end: a corporate film-strip system with a television attached, sold under a name that promised a home video revolution.

~ thirty dollars a tape ~

Sony shipped the U-matic and the argument was over. The U-matic cassette ran sixty minutes and cost around thirty dollars, and the machine reading it would also write to it, which meant a customer could put their own material on it that afternoon. An EVR cartridge cost somewhere between fifty and a hundred dollars just to manufacture, because every copy had to go through the electron beam process, and no amount of volume was going to fix a number that started that high.

CBS stopped funding development in 1971. The company kept a hand in as a program supplier and a licensor for a while rather than admitting the whole thing was over, but the money had gone out of it, and the American consumer version of EVR was finished before a single household ever had one. Goldmark left CBS in 1971 as well, after thirty-five years there.

~ where it kept running ~

The format outlived CBS's interest by four years on the other side of the world. A company called Nippon EVR was set up in Japan with a billion yen behind it and a shareholder list that ran from Teijin and Hitachi through to Mainichi Broadcasting, with ICI and Ciba-Geigy in from Europe. It found a thin slice of the Asian business market and kept production going into 1975, which is longer than the format ever managed in the country that invented it.

Its strangest afterlife is an arcade cabinet. In 1975 Nintendo built a horse betting machine called EVR Race that used the format to play back animated races, so you placed your bet and then watched a film of the result. It was the highest-grossing medal game in Japan for three years running, from 1976 to 1978. Peter Goldmark set out to put the CBS library in your living room and what the technology ended up doing reliably was taking coins in a Japanese amusement arcade.

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