ITT Corporation

[dazzlevision]

Originally Posted by Radio Wrangler

I believe ITT owned a semiconductor operation "Intermetall" in Germany that made complex system ICs for TVs.David

That is correct.

Intermetall GmbH. A German semiconductor manufacturer. By 1965, it was a subsidiary of the Clevite Corporation (USA). In the same year, ITT acquired Clevite’s US based semiconductor businesses, as well as Intermetall and the semiconductor interests of Brush-Clevite, Southampton, UK. The UK Brush-Clevite interests were transferred to STC (ITT’s UK company).

General Semiconductor Industries acquired, from ITT Industries, their semiconductor business, including Intermetall in Germany. In 2001, GSI was taken over by Vishay.

[Maarten]

Originally Posted by Radio Wrangler

In about 1991 I bought a high-end Panasonic TV. On taking a shufti inside when the teletext decoder device later took to shorting its power supply, I found a tube with a Philips sticker on it (The brochure waxed most lyrical about Panasonics new technology with matt-black material around the phosphor pixels)

Coincidentally, a few years later Panasonic bought the German CRT factory from SEL so they were less dependant on the buying in of tubes.

The black material around the phosphor might have involved cooperation with or patents from Matsushita so their claim might not even be fully false.

Bonus facts: The aforementioned SEL factory also made picture tubes with a Sony label on them (Trinitron production line for supplying the Wega plant). Early this century they also printed Philips on some of their own tube designs if they were to be used in Philips TV sets.

[llama]

"The Sovereign State is a non-fiction book by Anthony Sampson published on July 1, 1973 by Hodder & Stoughton Ltd. The book focuses on the history of ITT Corporation". I read it back then so memory is a bit faded. I do seem to recall mentions of Kissinger and government overthrow but that might have been the author's perception and/or my forgetory. Read it and make up your own mind.
Graham

[cheerfulcharlie]

Originally Posted by usradcoll1

Was that V2000 format the one that used a smaller cartridge that had the reels on top of the other?
There was a unit sold in the US that used that design. It was a format that was sold by the Quasar division of Matsushita after they bought the TV business from Motorola. They were out, only for a short time.
They referred to it as " The Great Time Machine". I never saw one.

No the V2000 was like a giant audio cassette ..and like an audio cassette you could flip it over and play down the other side. It had a lot of advanced features including noiseless freeze frame and RWD/FFWD. Sony later took it's best features and combined it with it's ailing Betamax to form 'Betacam' which revolutionized TV news gathering.

You might then ask why did it fail then? Well it was designed by Philips who were a bit mad professor at the time.ie they could do the technology but could not connect with people....so people found the customer interfacing controls not what they wanted,eccentric or in the wrong place etc.
However the most important reason was the lack of available titles to play on it..including of course porn. The consumer could just go out and get a simple to use and cheaper VHS and know that if anything was available prerecorded it would be on VHS first.

[Maarten]

Those are some reasons that are popularly mentioned, but as far as they are even valid, they probably weren't the most important reasons for the failure of V2000.

For the customer controls: Grundigs were a complete disaster while Philips's were about the most well thought through you could get apart from OSD systems such as first used by Akai.

The reasons for failure were multiple. Firstly and maybe most importantly, the law of the handicap of the first start. Philips had been making consumer VCR's since 1972, applying small improvements to the existing system up to around 1977 (and then went on manufacturing it up until early 1980). During this period, especially in the USA and Japan, VHS and Betamax were introduced and already competing for market share which gave them a very important head start.

Then, in 1979 a very advanced but expensive and failure prone first model was introduced, which didn't even feature some of the most important benefits of the system such as perfect slow motion. Mass availability was likely not before 1980.

Meanwhile, Panasonic (the most viable Japanese partner) had already chosen to go with VHS which was developed by JVC in which Panasonic had some financial interest. The only Japanese partner left for Philips was Marantz, which actually has sold and/or produced recorders for all three systems.

Around 1981/1982 the system had gotten more reliable, but sales were still behind, causing lack of interest by content makers (not only or maybe not even mostly porn) which in turn caused even less hardware sales. This probably wasn't in itself the largest problem, as video recorders were often just used for time shifting which was actually one of the strong points of V2000 with a relatively low cost per hour.

Another factor that contributed to the failure of V2000 was the US market. A market that has caused Philips trouble many times over, and this was no exception. The NAP management wouldn't have any of it and decided not to market V2000. In fact, they did the same with VHS and bought in most of their models from Panasonic and a few years later from Funai which in turn was the beginning of the end for the European VHS production - all be it some 10 years later.

Another interesting aspect is the European manufacturing base. Thomson might have been interested but chose JVC as their VHS partner - probably because the development of V2000 took way too long. In the early 1980's (might have been 1983/1984, I forgot) they were still interested in working with Philips to have a joint factory for producing modular video recorders, V2000 and VHS from the same factory. This apparently never happened, maybe because in 1984 the writing was already on the wall. Philips produced their first VHS recorders around the last quarter of 1984 and had apparently switched most V2000 production lines by january 1985 - after that only selling out stock and announcing the end of the system by 1986. Thomson went on to develop their own VHS models, working with Toshiba and possibly others.

[SiriusHardware]

Two previous posts have inferred the power of the availability of adult content on any given medium to influence its take-up, but in a more recent battle of the formats (HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray) the US Adult entertainment industry actually backed HD-DVD - and we all know how that one worked out...

[cheerfulcharlie]

It was a great shame for both ITT and Philips.

ITT made some great TVs where the picture tube never wore out (common in those days for a CTV picture tube to last around 3 years) even though they were using the same Mullard tubes everybody else was using and they made some very elegant and robust cassette recorders..
...and the last Philips 2000s were well and truly sorted, lightweight, attractive reliable machines that did everything that the system promised.

[Maarten]

The Mullard tubes never wore out, but ITT-SEL's own tubes on the other hand tended to go a bit soft.

[Hybrid tellies]

Its just amazing to look back and see how large an organisation ITT was and how it's all gone. A pity really because ITT/KB and then ITT did produce some really good equipment which performed and lasted well.