I love this sort of stuff.
A few points:
1. I was a huge fan of James Burke's Connections back in the day and his framing of technological progress is still an influence.
2. Burke was correct about the impact of satellites on television, but he was somewhat optimistic about the adoption curve. It would take more like 15 years for all of those channels to start overwhelming viewers.
3. I'm a bit surprised that developers were still working on this kind of reverse kinescope in the late 60s, years after videotape had been adopted by broadcasters.
4. Super-8 came out a few years before this and the Fisher-Price Movie Viewer came out five years later so the idea of a film-based home/classroom video system probably didn't seem too impractical.
5. I'm sure that the picture quality was better with this system but one of the lessons of the history of home video is that consumers were surprisingly indifferent to how good the images looked.
6. The Prisoner had just wrapped. Maybe that's where they got the chair.
1968: Is this the FUTURE of TELEVISION? | Tomorrow's World | Retro Tech | BBC Archive
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