Stewart Wolpin

RCA's Slow Fade
November 1, 2007

It was not a big story for most folks in the consumer electronics business: Audiovox To Buy RCA A/V Business. It was even a smaller story outside the CE biz. As far as I could tell, neither The New York Times nor the Wall Street Journal reported it. 

Few may have noticed, but I was overwhelmed by the kind of nostalgic sadness I felt after I threw out my dusty audio cassette mix tapes and 8-inch floppy disks. And even though I know intellectually that things in technology change and that the RCA I once knew was gone a long time ago, I feel as if a long-ailing friend had died. 

I'm an on-again, off-again elector for the Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame, the anonymous author of the history section of CEA's Digital America, and have written many tech history pieces, including one detailing RCA's failed attempt to invent blank video recording. 

This self-aggrandizement is just my way of illustrating my appreciation for the place RCA has in our industry's history. Not only did RCA arguably create both the consumer electronics and broadcasting businesses, for a humongous chunk of the twentieth century, RCA WAS the consumer electronics and broadcasting business. David Sarnoff, RCA's imperious president and chairman, was Steve Jobs, Howard Stringer and Rupert Murdoch rolled into one. That kind of singular presence may have been stultifying in some ways, but it also kept things simple.

 Since Sarnoff's death in 1971, the RCA monolith has been slowly crumbling to the point where its dominance is now barely remembered. The sale of the remnants of its A/V business for what seems a paltry $20 million was the final chunks of the CE business's foundation crumbling away. 

By a strange coincidence, just as RCA's death is passing virtually unnoticed, its birth and rise to dominance is being staged on Broadway in “The Farnsworth Invention.” Written by Aaron Sorkin (“The West Wing,” “A Few Good Men”), the play inventively presents the complex battle between Sarnoff and Philo T. Farnsworth over the invention of television.  

I caught a preview performance of the play a couple of weeks ago (the play officially opens Nov. 15, coincidentally the night after CEA's pre-CES fish and goose soirée in New York). I'm no theater critic, so I won't comment on the play's theatrical merits. But as someone who's been writing about the CE business for nearly 25 years, I was mesmerized. 

Attendance at “The Farnsworth Invention” (or, if you can't get to New York, a reading of "The Last Lone Inventor" by Evan I. Schwartz or "The Boy Genius and the Mogul" by Daniel Stashower) should be required for anyone with a connection to this business. It doesn't just tell the story of television. Strains of Sorkin's Sarnoff-Farnsworth struggle echo through the development of every technological milestone since Alexander Graham Bell beat Elisha Gray to the patent office on Valentine's Day 1876.  

One echo, to me, reverberated the loudest. 

Sarnoff needs a certain technology. RCA executives advise Sarnoff to simply license the patents. But Sorkin's Sarnoff espouses a principal that has been both the boon and the bane of the CE business ever since: "We have to control the patents and we shouldn't be paying royalties — we should be collecting them." 

Right. Control the patents. Getting paid royalties instead of paying them are the reasons behind every Blu-ray/HD DVD and every other consumer-confusing and often mutually destructive format war ever waged. 

Nipper may have a new owner, but his old master's voice is still being heard.

Posted by Stewart Wolpin on November 1, 2007 | Comments (1)