No matter who you are, star athlete, charismatic tech news host, or eastern block dictator,
holding on to power is a difficult task. And perhaps few people realize this more than the people behind the iconic TV brands of
yesteryear. There's a good chance you remember a time when iconic brands like Zenith were found
in every hotel room and store shelves were chock full of RCA TVs.
But these days, they've all but vanished. So what the heck happened?
A lot of major brands that we were used to seeing here in North America were domestically
based and it's no secret that tons of manufacturing has left the United States and is now based
in China. You can learn about the rise of Chinese electronics in this video, but it doesn't tell the whole
story of what specifically happened to those old TV makers.
To a large extent, the US TV industry became architects of their own demise.
Although major American TV manufacturers once were global brands, they couldn't sell in
every major market. And a very important one, Japan, had serious legal hurdles that made it tough for foreign
companies to sell products there. So instead, they licensed their tech out to Japanese electronics firms, hoping to reap
profits off of royalties. But instead, Japanese companies took the technology and actually improved on it.
And before long, Japanese TVs entered the US market and began to steamroll the American
brands. In the US, the TV industry was viewed as mature, and the attitude among the folks in charge
was, hey, what we have is good enough for everybody.
So let's just focus on marketing and cost efficiency.
Cha-ching. But obviously, we're no longer watching massive tube TVs in wooden cabinets.
Japanese brands believed a better strategy was to continue innovating, imagine that.
And sure enough, they introduced models that were higher quality and more lightweight thanks
to their use of transistors instead of vacuum tubes.
In fact, between 1970 and 1976, Japanese brands like Sony and Panasonic tripled their market
share in the US, capturing nearly one half of it.
Zenith's response, however, wasn't to pour more money into development to make their
own products better, but instead to take the Japanese companies to court for supposed antitrust
violations. That's one way to do it. Now this cost a lot of money, and the litigation dragged on for over a decade, but Zenith ultimately
lost anyways. Making matters even worse, the US companies failed to see the potential of emerging TV-related
technologies. For example, Sony started working on a low-cost VCR back in 1956, way before they even knew
there would be a demand for it. American electronic companies at the time typically took a much more conservative approach
by trying to ensure through consumer studies that there would be a market for something
before they produced it, which ended up biting them as foreign manufacturers were effectively
creating new markets, and VCRs became much more widespread than the disk-based technology
the American companies were working on. Now this put even more financial pressure on American companies who didn't have as
many product segments to compete in, and the Domino's, they began falling, baby.
Zenith was bought by Korea-based LG in 1995, and no longer makes TVs.
RCA only exists as a brand name now owned by a company based here in Canada.
And Magnavox is now also a minor brand owned by a Japanese company.
It was taken over by a couple of entrepreneurs from Tennessee, but then went bankrupt in
2004 after China was admitted to the WTO a few years prior, and started exporting TVs
en masse to the United States. So the moral of the story here is that many of these brands we used to see all the time
disappeared in huge part because many of them were just standing still.
Good times simply don't last if you don't do anything to innovate.
In fact, we're thinking about moving TechWiki off of YouTube and just full time onto TikTok.
Maybe that'll work. You just gotta keep moving. We're not doing that.
That's not gonna happen. Alright, that's it for this video guys. Hey, thanks for watching.
Why don't you check out some of our other videos because there's lots. And if you have an idea for what we can talk about next on TechWiki, leave a comment below.
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