Comments by "Neil Forbes" (@neilforbes416) on "Technology Connections" channel.

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  4. Emile Berliner established the Deutsche Grammophon Gesellshaft(German Gramophone Company) around the mid-to-late 1870s. His initial trademark on single-sided discs was the Aufnahmende Engerl(Recording Angel) embossed on the unrecorded side of the disc. Within a decade he'd travelled to England where he established a British division called The Gramophone Company Of England Ltd. and it was through the British division that Berliner first acquired the painting that was to provide the new trademark, it was of a Jack Russell Terrier listening to "his master's voice" on, initially a cylinder-based phonograph, but on request, the artist painted over the cylinder machine with a disc-playing gramophone, thus the trademark "His Master's Voice" was born. Ownership of the trademark would be held by Berliner but control of the trademark, and licencing its use would be vested in the British division of Berliner's empire. In the 1890s, Berliner travelled to the USA and set up the Victor Talking Machine Company in Camden, New Jersey. The new entity would licence the trademark from the British division. This arrangement lasted until the outbreak of WW1. After that war, Berliner lost control of his British and US companies. The Gramophone Company of England assumed TOTAL ownership and control of "Nipper" as the dog was named in the trademark, and Berliner's DGG had to licence the trademark it once owned, a bitter pill to swallow. DGG could only use the HMV trademark in Germany under the translation: "Die Stimme Seines Herrens", for export, they had to create a new brand, Polydor. In the meantime, Victor in the USA was using the HMV trademark, licencing same from The Gramophone Co. in England. Until 1929 when some reps from RCA came sniffing around the Victor plant, looking for somewhere bigger than what they had, so they could build more radios. RCA started as a division of General Electric but soon took on autonomy after getting hold of the Victor plant and brand-name, but that's all they should've got, no more. The HMV trademark licencing should've ended the minute the ink was dry on the deed of sale of the Victor plant and name to RCA and the Dog & Gramophone should not have been seen in America or Canada again until 1955. WW2 came and went, just prior to that war, The Gramophone Company had merged with Columbia Graphophone Company(a surviving remnant of a failed US venture) to form Electric & Musical Industries Ltd.[EMI], the year was 1938. The merger also brought the Parlophone brand into the mix as Columbia had gained this former Dutch-owned trademark as war booty from WW1. After the 2nd war, EMI expanded into Europe, its new German division, Electrola GmbH taking over control of the HMV trademark, leaving DGG having to use Polydor now for domestic as ell as export markets. Berliner himself was spared the ignominy of seeing all this as he was in his grave by then. Siemens bought out DGG. In America a new label, Capitol was launched just after the war, the new entity struggling to find its feet. A decade on and Capitol would become the infant member of the expanding EMI group. Infant, because EMI bought an established label rather than EMI setting the company up from scratch. EMI owned almost 95% of Capitol, the remaining 5-and-a-bit% held by Capitol's founder. It's here that EMI should've brought in the HMV brand, reappearing in the USA to carry the EMI British roster into the American market, particularly in the 1960s: The Beatles, Cliff Richard & The Shadows, Herman's Hermits, Manfred Mann, Billy J. Kramer & The Dakotas etc., drawn from EMI's HMV, Columbia and Parlophone labels, all together on HMV in the USA instead of scattered around the non-EMI labels like they were.
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  112. 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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  114. In 1929 when RCA(still part of General Electric) bought the plant at Camden, New Jersey, and the Victor brand-name, that's ALL they should've been allowed to buy. The His Master's Voice brand was 100% owned by The Gramophone Company of England Pty Ltd., and The Gramophone Company should've IMMEDIATELY REVOKED The Victor Talking Machine Comany's licence to use the HMV trademark. Prior to World War One, The Gramophone Company of England held 50% of the HMV brand, the other 50% being held by what was, at that time, the British company's German parent, Deutsche Grammophon Gesellshaft mbH, under which, the trademark was known as "Die Stimme Seines Herrens". Emile Berliner, who had established the German and British companies, also set up the Victor Talking Machine Company in Camden, New Jersey, but only as an afterthought. Victor was an insignificant minor side-operation. It owned not even the smallest fraction of 1% interest in the HMV trademark and the patents on the trademark and the products made, disc-playing gramophones and the discs themselves were registered by DGG and The Gramophone Co. Victor played ZERO part in the development and/or improvement thereof, they just made and sold the product, nothing more. In 1918, after WW1, DGG lost the Gramophone Co and Victor Talking Machine Co. as "spoils of war". Indeed, DGG could now only use the HMV trademark in Germany itself and only under licence from its former division, now fully-fledged independent company, The Gramophone Co. DGG found itself in a similar situation to its insignificant American offshoot, Victor. The HMV trademark was now 100% British-owned and Victor was now paying licence fees to Britain for the privilege of using the trademark and building the HMV gramophone for the US/Canada market and putting its own name on what was basically a British product. So that brings us back to 1929 and two jokers come sniffing around the Victor plant at Camden, initially just wanting greater floor space to expand radio production, but seeing what was going on, deciding to get in on the act, and here is where The Gramophone Co. should've said "STOP! You can buy the plant and the Victor name but the rights to the HMV brand are NON-TRANSFERABLE! The Brand is EXCLUSIVELY the property of The Gramophone Co. of England and will remain so until WE deem otherwise!"
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  117. The better result would be that in 1929, instead of RCA buying Victor Taliking Machine Co., that RCA AND Victor both end up as being owned by The Gramophone Co. of England. RCA would still not get its grubby paws on the HMV trademark as that trademark would return to the British aforementioned company that solely owns it. Instead, the RCA and the Victor trademarks would be owned by, and used in Britain by The Gramophone Co. as record labels carrying American artists into the British market. When The Gramophone Co. and Columbia Graphophone Co. merged to form EMI in 1938(1931 sounds far too early and Columbia Graphophone was relaunching the Columbia brand in America at the time), then the RCA and Victor brands would be kept separate and used as described earlier. In 1955 when EMI bought out the largest chunk of Capitol, the HMV brand would then return to the USA and Canada. CBS should then be bought by EMI so as to establish in the USA, the HMV and Columbia Brands as flagship labels of EMI North Americas Pty. Ltd., based *NOT in Hollywood California, but in Toronto, Ontario Canada as Canada is a British Commonwealth Country and EMI is a British company! With TV manufacture and marketing, EMI would make the sets for the American/Canadian markets at its British plants. The sets for Canada would be branded His Master'sVoice, the sets for the USA would be branded RCA, but the colour system would be a modified PAL system to accommodate America/Canada's 117 Volt/60 Hz power system. By EMI owning RCA and CBS, this would stop RCA falling into the hands of BMG and CBS into the hands of Sony.
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  120. One correction: Known STATION at known time! A channel is nothing more than a chunk of spectrum space(7Mhz for PAL-system colour broadcasting, 6Mhz for NTSC in the analogue days - we'll ignore SECAM as it was a rubbish system). Without the STATION to broadcast its programme content across that range of bandwidth, you would get only static hash, same as when the station closed down for the night, as they did in the 1970s. A channel produces nothing, employs no-one, earns no revenue, pays no salaries, it can't, because a channel is ethereal. A channel's only physical representation is in the circuitry of the tuner used to select it. As you turn that knob(in those old days) your set goes clunk-clunk-clunk through 13, 15 or maybe 20 VHF channels but there may only be signals on three, they'd be the NBC, CBS or ABC affiliate for your area, or if your in a small town, you'd have two stations, each independent and carrying their pick of content from the three major networks plus some local shows produced in their own studios. The remaining channels will be blank unless a stray signal comes a-wafting its way past your antenna and it might be a distant independent or a network affiliate that you might sniff it up on Ch.6. Put it this way, if you're in an art gallery and see a painting that grabs your attention, do you give credit to a] the artist who worked and sweated blood to create it, or b] the canvas on which it was painted, ignoring the artist's efforts? Crediting the channel for TV shows is like crediting the canvas for the painting.
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  131. Those 3" discs really were a fucking waste of time. Their capacity(storage) would've been around 20 minutes, about 125-200 Mb, so-called "CD-singles"..... HAH! A 45rpm record could easily carry an epic song like Gordon Lightfoot's 1976 release, "The Wreck Of The Edmund FitzGerald" which clocks in at over 7 minutes, and is in STEREO as well! Thus making these CD-singles REDUNDANT before they were even developed. What makes the record a "single" is that, on a turntable, one side is face-up and accessible to the pick-up arm, the other is face-down on the platter mat. The disc has the run-in groove leading to the modulated section of that groove, then out to the centre dead-wax(there's only one groove spiralling into the centre, so it's wrong to say "grooves" plural) which means there's no wasted capacity but these "CD-singles" when inserted to play, the laser, though playing one song at a time, has access directly to all the content of the disc(usually 3 or more songs, which means it's not a "CD-single") playing for 15 minutes, leaving 5 minutes wasted..... UTTERLY STUPID! The indented portion of the tray(15:25) was standard in players almost from the get-go, that's an early model player being used. The standard 5" disc with its initial 74-minute, then later 80-minute capacity is best suited to albums, even then you get a lot of wasted capacity as some albums when reissued in the format, may have only played for 30-45 minutes, leaving a lot of wasted capacity.... Ugh! As to ink discolouring the disc surface.... I've never seen that! Probably because the Australian firm, Disctronics took greater care in how they produced their discs.
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  142. Emile Berliner was the founder of Deutsche Grammophon Gesellshaft mbH in Germany. He also established a British division, The Gramophone Company of England Ltd. It was these two companies that, in the years leading up to WW1 shared ownership 50/50 of the Dog & Gramophone, "His Master's Voice" trademark. Berliner also set up the Victor Talking Machine Company in the USA but did so ONLY as an afterthought. Victor held no share whatsoever in the famous HMV trademark and used it ONLY under licence from DGG and The Gramophone Co. of England until 1918, and from 1918 from the British company only, as DGG had lost co-ownership as a result of the war, and could only use the trademark in Germany under licence from its former division. The Gramophone Co. should've put a halt to RCA acquiring the trademark when RCA bought the Victor name and plant in 1929. RCA already had its own trademark but Victor's only self-owned trademark was its own brand-name, the Dog & Gramophone trademark was NOT Victor's to do anything with except surrender the licence and let the trademark revert to its British owner. In 1938 The Gramophone Co. merged with Columbia Graphophone Company, the successful British orphan child of the failed US company of that name, to form Electric & Musical Industries Ltd., bringing together the Dog & Gramophone HMV trademark and Columbia's Magic Notes trademark to become the two flagship labels of EMI, while a third label, Parlophone, a former Dutch-owned label acquired as post-WW1 war booty by either Columbia Graphophone or The Gramophone Co., became the label for novelty acts until 1962 when four Liverpudlian kids were signed to the label....... When EMI bought Capitol in 1955 to make it a subsidiary of EMI(subsidiary = infant child), EMI should've FORCED RCA to relinquish the Dog & Gramophone trademark so it could be used in the USA under its CORRECT name, "His Master's Voice", as well as making Capitol distribute the Parlophone and(in lieu of CBS using the Columbia name), Regal-Zonophone labels as well as any other labels EMI would own in the coming decades, ensuring that ALL EMI's artist & group roster would appear on Capitol-distributed labels instead of getting farmed out to all and sundry non-EMI labels.
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  204. "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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