Comments by "Neil Forbes" (@neilforbes416) on "Race to the finish; RCA's final gamble (CED Part 5)" video.

  1. RCA convincing GE to"go along" with the CED system? Why not? Historically, GE was originally RCA's parent company!
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  2. Maybe the better thing to happen should be thus: 1929 Execs from RCA(then owned by General Electric as a minor division) go sniffing around the Victor plant at Camden NJ, see what's happening and suggest to RCA they get into the recording business and making the gramophones to play these records. When they approach Victor to offer to buy the company, Victor accepts the offer, but only for the plant and the "Victor" name, The trademark of HMV DID NOT belong to Victor and they had no right to on-sell that brand. RCA insists it wants the HMV brand and the head of Britain's Gramophone Company which, by then is a separate and wholly-British-owned entity as a consequence of WW1 steps in and BLOCKS RCA's acquisition of the HMV(His Master's Voice) trademark, which is the British company's own property, 100%. Instead of RCA getting their hands on the HMV trademark, The Gramophone Company buys 100% of RCA! and becomes the owner of the Victor AND RCA brands which The Gramophone Company merges together to become RCA and markets the records in Britain under that brand. RCA still does NOT get to use the HMV brand in the USA but markets the records and gramophones under the RCA brand. The Victor brand being phased out under The Gramophone Co.'s orders so RCA WILL NOT BE PERMITTED to use the name "Victrola". Fast-forward to 1955 and The Gramophone Co. merging with Columbia Graphophone Co in England to form EMI in the 1930s, buys out a touch under 95% of an insignificant little record label called Capitol. EMI then imposes the HMV trademark as well as the RCA trademark on Capitol to manufacture and distribute, while RCA is reduced to being the electrical division only. Capitol will be rebranded as EMI North Americas Ltd. and relocated to Toronto, Canada as Canada is a British Commonwealth member country and EMI is British, after all. EMI also buys up CBS so they can use the Columbia name in the USA and Canada(after all, it was Columbia Graphophone, England that re-established the Columbia name in the USA anyway) so that His Master's Voice and Columbia are established as EMI's flagship labels in the USA and Canada, as they already are in EMI's other territories and the Capitol and RCA brands being reduced to their proper status as "two of the other minor insignificant trademarks" in the EMI group. Colour TVs would be made in Britain for the Canadian and US markets, for Canada they'd carry the His Master's Voice brand, for the USA they'd carry the lesser RCA brand. RCA in the USA will be limited to making radios and stereo gear. As for video technologies, EMI would put an Immediate block on RCA doing ANYTHING in that field. That work would be carried out at EMI's British factories. So the CED system would never be made and no money wasted on it. Instead, EMI would licence the Pioneer laserdisc system(I'm not giving credit to Philips here because Philips makes crap!).
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  3. Matsushita (Mat - su - SHI - ta) is INDEED the OWNER of the JVC brand, as well as owning what was originally National before Matsushita split the brand off into National Technics and National Panasonic, finally ditching the "National" brand to leave only the Technics and Panasonic brands under Matsushita ownership. As for the name Victor Talking Machine Company, that was the company name for the USA market PRIOR to 1929 when Emile Berliner set up the US subsidiary as an afterthought, an insignificant company in an insignificant country.
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  4. Matsushita WAS INDEED the parent company of both JVC-Nivico AND National(later to be split into two entities, Panasonic and Technics, which started as sub-brands under National but later the National brand was done away with, leaving Panasonic and Technics as stand=alone brands under the Matsushita umbrella. Pronunciation of the name, emphasis is on the first and third syllables, MAT-su-SHI-ta!
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  5. "His Master's Voice" was developed by Emile Berliner in the late 19th Century, originally in German as "Die Stimme Seines Herrens". The artist, Francis Barraud painted the picture of a Jack Russell Terrier listening to the voice of his master on an Edison cylendar-playing phonograph which Berliner, as inventor of the disc-playing Gramophone, had at first rejected. but when Barraud made the alteration to replace the phonograph with a gramophone, Berliner adopted it as the trademark of his Deutsche Grammophon Gesselshaft and his offshoot, The Gramophone Company of England Ltd., which, between them would own the His Master's Voice name and trademark on a 50/50 shared basis. Berliner then, in the early years of the 20th Century, travels to an insignificant country called America and sets up, as an afterthought, a minor operation called Victor Talking Machine Company to manufacture gramophones to te British/German design and patent specs, and to make discs to play on those machines, again to British/German patents and specs (specifications). Victor would use the HMV trademark BUT NOT EVER OWN ANY PART of it. The HMV trademark would, up to 1914 remain 50/50 with DGG in Germany and The Gramophone Co. in England. Victor would only hold a licence to use the trademark. The only thing the American company owned was the factory at Camden, NJ and the Victor name. WW1, beginning in 1914 saw DGG lose its 50% stake in HMV, name and trademark, and at the end of that war in 1918, DGG had to apply to its former offshoot for a licence to use the trademark combined with the German translation of the name, "Die Stimme Seines Herrens" while The Gramophone Co. assumed 100% ownership of the trademark and name as war reparations. The Gramophone Co. held that 100% ownership until 1938 when it merged with Columbia Graphophone Co. to form EMI, that new entity then assumed 100% ownership of the HMV name and trademark, plus the names and trademarks of Columbia(Magic Notes) and Parlophone(Pound symbol). In 1929, 9 years before the merger, RCA sent a couple of execs to Camden NJ to "suss out" the Victor plant with the view to buying it to make radio sets(RCA was still just a division of GE at the time), saw what was going on, reported back to RCA bigwigs in New York and set about buying the plant and the Victor name, with the HMV trademark, but the snag was that the Dog & Gramophone HMV brand was NOT Victor's to sell, or even sub-lease. The trademark was still 100% the property of The Gramophone Co. The ONLY legitimate way for RCA to acquire the HMV brand was to become a subsidiary of The Gramophone Company, and sunsequently, a subsidiary of EMI in 1938. For this to happen, RCA would have to become EMI(North Americas) Pty Ltd and shift their headquarters to Toronto, Ontario, Canada! They still would not OWN the trademark, but would be allowed to use it provided the Victor name was ditched and replaced with the His Master's Voice name, the RCA brand would be a secondary label WITHOUT the Victor appendage. And in 1955 when EMI buys Capitol, Capitol then becomes EMI Records(USA) Pty Ltd and distributes all the EMI brands under licence except for Columbia, the Regal/Zonophone brand would substitute.
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  6.  @kaitlyn__L  It's a hangover from RCA pre-WW2. But yes, EMI should've revoked JVC's licence to use the HMV trademark in 1939 when WW2 began, then post WW2, EMI give the licence to their Japanese subsidiary, Toshiba to use the trademark. JVC should've reworked the Victor brand-name design to divorce it from the RCA Victor design. JVC has disassociated from RCA at the beginning of WW2 in any case.
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