VCR Plus+

~ the goodbye ~

The problem it solved was real and slightly humiliating. Setting a VCR to record something meant working through a four-line LCD with about six buttons, entering a channel and a start time and a stop time and a day, in an order that made sense to whoever wrote the firmware. Half the households in the developed world gave up on it entirely. The blinking twelve is a joke from this exact failure.

Henry Yuen and Daniel Kwoh, both Caltech-trained, founded Gemstar in Pasadena in 1989 and attacked it as a compression problem. If you already have the broadcast schedule, then a program is fully identified by the channel it is on and the block of time it occupies, and that can be packed into a single number of one to eight digits. Print the number in the listings, type it into a box, and the box unpacks it back into settings and sends them to the VCR over infrared. The first product shipped in November 1990 at around $60, a handheld that sat on top of the recorder and pretended to be its remote. It sold out.

Within a couple of years the codes were in major newspapers and in TV Guide, and manufacturers were licensing the decoder to build it into the recorder directly so you could skip the extra box. The system went international under different names, since the arithmetic depends on a country's channel lineup. Most of Europe got it as ShowView, Britain and Ireland as VideoPlus+, and the G-Code version covered Japan through to Australia. Gemstar merged with TV Guide in 1999, Macrovision bought the combined company in 2008 and became Rovi, and the last PlusCode was published in 2010.

The interesting thing from outside the United States is that the product was never really the gadget. The gadget was cheap and the algorithm was clever, but the thing that made it work was a listings publisher agreeing to print an extra column, in every edition, forever. That is a contract, not an invention, and it means the feature reached you or did not reach you depending on whether the magazine on your kitchen table had signed one. Plenty of us owned recorders with the logo on the front panel and never once had a number to type into them.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

For a period in the nineties this was the rare piece of consumer technology that made someone's life measurably easier in a way they could describe to a neighbor. Recording a show went from a five minute argument with a manual to reading eight digits off a page. Gemstar licensed it aggressively and it turned up on the spec sheet of nearly every mid-range VCR, then on DVD recorders after that.

The economics were the clever part. Gemstar did not really sell hardware for long. It sold the right to decode, taking a fee from every manufacturer who wanted the logo, while the publishers printed the codes for free because readers wanted them. A patent on a numbering scheme became a toll booth on an entire category of consumer electronics, and Yuen defended it hard enough that Gemstar's patent litigation became a story of its own.

~ the funny part ~

The codes were compressed, so they were fragile in a specific way. A misprint of one digit did not give you a slightly wrong recording, it gave you a completely unrelated channel at an unrelated hour, because the number is an encoding rather than a description. Newspapers ran corrections for PlusCodes. People taped the wrong thing and blamed the machine, which had done precisely what it was told.

There was also the schedule problem. The code encoded when the broadcaster said the program would start, not when it started. Sport ran long and the evening slid, and the tape ended with three minutes missing from something you had waited a week for. Every household that used the system developed the same defensive habit of adding the next code as well, on the theory that too much tape is cheaper than the end of a film.

~ what got buried with it ~

The DVR is what actually ended it. Once a box holds the schedule internally and knows the program by name, an encoded number is a workaround for a problem that no longer exists. TiVo shipped in 1999 and the argument was over well before the last code was printed. Gemstar itself understood this, which is why the company spent the 2000s moving toward on-screen guides and patent licensing rather than defending a printed number.

What went with it is the idea of a television schedule as a shared printed object. The codes only made sense in a world where a newspaper listing was the authoritative statement of what would be on, and where everyone in a country was looking at the same grid. Streaming did not just replace the VCR. It removed the thing the number was pointing at.

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