The discs produced a television signal directly, and were pressed the same way as any LP. Complexity and costs ballooned because RCA demanded comically small grooves. At an hour per side, any speck of dust would cause skipping, so the final product had a ridiculous semi-mechanized caddy system. This is despite tremendous difficulty even making grooves that small, with their metallic vinyl formula, let alone placing the zillion tiny pits which encode the signal.

Compromising on play time would have relaxed all of those tolerances. The minimum-bullshit version of this technology would work like any other phonograph - disc spins on platter, arm follows groove, amplifier does its thing. There’s no laser tracking. There’s no decoding. There’s no serpentine tape transport. There’s no helical-scan witchcraft. It’s a higher frequency of wiggly line.

All of this should have been dirt cheap. More electric than electronic. But in the absence of competition, they wanted to get it Just Right, and spent twenty years solving problems instead of avoiding problems. Minimum viable products change the world.