Most spectacular "fail"in the Audio/Visual field...?

Okay...A little light hearted "holiday" fun, and I have no wish to upset anyone,nor do I have the technical knowledge to argue product specifics.....BUT, to get the ball rolling(and taking an exclusive UK standpoint) I will nominate 3D Television....it has had more lives than the proverbial cat here in Albion,and despite being the next next next "big thing" has barely caused a ripple with regard to sales or take up. I am sure this will take the prize,but there could be a product waiting in the wings to snatch the gold medal away..

 

There was plenty of hype.

I'll argue that while Betamax lost the battle to VHS, in the long run Sony made money on the format. Worldwide it had a nice 30 year run and with all the professional spin-offs Sony created using the basic Beta format, there were years and years of sales of Betamax products.

My nominee is RCA Selectavision. It too lost to a competing format, Laserdisc, that had its own 20 year run, but Selectavision was a technological dead end. RCA bet a lot of money that Selectavision discs would replace video tapes and they lost big time on that bet. The failure of Selectavision alone permanently sent production of the video player/recorder market overseas, embarrassing for a premier company like RCA.

 

What was that Circuit City co-sponsored disc rental thing? DIVX or something?

 

Polavision was an instant movie camera system launched by Polaroid in 1977

In addition to the density problems, the process was late to market and had to compete with upcoming videocassette-based systems like Betamax and VHS. Unlike videotape, Polavision films, once developed, could not be reused nor played on a television, nor did it have sound. Polavision proved to be an expensive failure, and most of the manufactured equipment was sold off in 1979 as a job lot at a loss of $68.5 million. In the wake of those losses, Polaroid chairman and founder Edwin H. Land resigned the chief executive position in 1980 and left the company two years later.​

 

Elcaset

 

This was the first thing that I thought of. DIVX was an attempt by the movie industry to get people to pay for every viewing of a film, more or less. The public resoundingly rejected it, I recall. However Wiki has a slightly different take:

DIVX - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia »

It was my opinion then and still is that DIVX was a horrible idea. The funny thing is, some 17 years later, that we are approaching a pay-per-view paradigm through streaming video online. However, most services allow as many views of a movie or TV show as you desire once you "purchase" the title.

 

Definitely DIVX. So many people actually hated it, passionately.

 

DIVX was the worst, wasn't it? The other thing that comes to mind is the competitor to the bluray disc, it hasn't been that many years and I've already forgotten the name of the competing format!

 

HD-DVD. But it was actually good at the time.

 

Betamax was superior to VHS!! I'll go with Microsoft and tha HD DVD Drive/add on and also tha Kinect.. Both were lauded.. Neither lived up to tha hype/promises..

atb

 

Thanks Sam, HD-DVD it was. I guess the playback quality was good (never saw it myself) but it was out marketed by the consortium behind blu-ray. Funny thing is that in the long run, even though bluray "won" the race, physical media appears to have a limited shelf life.

 

I don't really think 3D television is a failure. If you want one, you can get it and there is a ton of software. It is and will always be a niche market.

 

Something that really stunted 3D TV in the states is that you couldn't rent the discs...you had no choice but to buy them.
Of course I found this out after I had purchased one.

 

A friend and I plunked down $59.00 for the entire package at Service Merchandise right when the Polavision was in it's
death throes. The films looked crappy after about 5 plays, and the camera broke when we dropped it on the carpet!
It was fun for a few weeks, though.

 

Philips & Matsushita's Digital Compact Cassette comes to mind. I bought Philips top of the line deck (DCC 900 if my memory serves me well) back in 1993 after spending months saving for it. I remember after spending a couple of hours ''playing'' with it at home I regreted already of buying it. The thing sounded well, but it was a pain in the @.. to operate, either recording or playing a tape and trying to search for a track. One thing that surprised me about the format was that I was expecting tape drop-outs in the form of digital pops or glitches, but never had one. I even took a tape and got it through a torture test recording in it, erasing it, recording again, and again, and again endless times, and never had a tape drop-out, error correction on it must have been very well designed.
But it was the clumsiest piece of equipment I ever had.

 

Clearly the vast majority of consumers agreed with you, but I don't think the basic idea was bad... There were issues that are discussed in the Wiki article, especially the pan and scan thing, (keeping in mind that most VHS rentals at that time were pan and scan), but I don't think that was the primary reason it failed.

I think there was a much bigger education issue, for one thing, than Circuit City was prepared to handle. Divx was intended to compete against rentals, but you actually bought the disc and took it home and kept it. The economics were pretty sound... You paid about what you'd pay for a Blockbuster rental and then, once you got past the initial viewing window (that started when you actually watched the movie, not when you bought it) you paid a couple bucks more to watch it again, the same way you'd pay to rent it again. But the consumer couldn't wrap its mind around paying again for something you'd already "bought."

There was also the issue of having to have a phone line plugged into the player - a lot of people didn't have a spare phone jack on their entertainment wall. It might have had a better chance in today's wireless environment.

But the killer, the fatal blow that not only killed Divx, but eventually took Circuit City down with it, was the huge miscalculation they made on distribution. They actually thought they could get Blockbuster to carry these things, even though the concept was antithetical to Blockbuster's business model. If Blockbuster sold the discs, they would have had to split the revenue with Circuit City; they would never get late fee revenue; and there would never be a re-rental.

What Circuit City didn't grasp was that this should have been an impulse product, something you could grab at a 7-11 on your way home and save a trip to the video store. No one was going to plan their video rental habit around going to Circuit City. Racks of these discs at convenience and grocery stores would have provided the consumer a real choice.

I lived in Richmond at the time, where Circuit City was headquartered, and this was a huge story. It was very sad to see the company's decline in subsequent years, but they took an enormous gamble and made enormous mistakes and their demise was pretty much inevitable afterward.

 

DAT!

 

The end of the need for lights - wallpaper that glows in the dark.

 

Good points. What I hated about DIVX in particular was the need for the extra phone jack. I had no intention of spending the money for having a new jack installed to rent a video and then giving a company that I knew little about access to a credit card account wasn't going to happen. The other thing was, of course, the pan and scan thing. I have always felt that movies should be presented in their theatrical aspect ratio. That was the biggest reason that I adopted Laserdisc over VHS, though I did have a VHS recorder.

I'm going to predict a new fail: I was at Best Buy recently, and they have a selection of 4k Blu-ray discs. Mind you, at this point they have no players on which to play them, so I am asking myself "Why???" As internet speeds seem to be increasing greatly, I believe that video streaming in HD and even in 4K and beyond is coming in the next few years. As others have noted, there will then be no need to own a physical disc system. Currently, I'm happy with the picture quality I'm getting from BD which is still far superior to any "HD" streaming content available to me (and my download speed is around 100 megabits per second.) As for 4k; I'll wait to see what the future holds. Personally, I don't think that I could see the difference on a home-sized screen between standard Blu-ray and 4k. So perhaps we can lump 4k into the possible fails of the future as well, but I'm now guilty of conjecture which is really off topic.

 

In terms of time and money invested, one of the biggest failures has got to be Compact Disc -Interactive (CD-I). Philips hyped this to the heavens, funded developers, and created a manufacturing plant for the discs and players. Sony dropped out as an early partner and developed the PlayStation, correctly assessing that the only people who would interact with their TV would be gamers.

One of the few commercial titles was created by Todd Rundgren, which included a virtual studio that allowed you to re-mix the songs on the disc.

 

Only as a consumer format. DAT was widely used in professional settings.

 

In the consumer format it was a money pit, and a warranty was just a ticket for endless trips to see someone who didn't actually know how to fix the machines. In my experience anyway.

 

yes, consumer...

 

I had the Sony DTC 60ES. It was a trouble free experience.