WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.080 No matter who you are, star athlete, charismatic tech news host, or eastern block dictator, 00:00:06.080 --> 00:00:14.080 holding on to power is a difficult task. And perhaps few people realize this more than the people behind the iconic TV brands of 00:00:14.080 --> 00:00:19.440 yesteryear. There's a good chance you remember a time when iconic brands like Zenith were found 00:00:19.440 --> 00:00:24.320 in every hotel room and store shelves were chock full of RCA TVs. 00:00:24.320 --> 00:00:28.160 But these days, they've all but vanished. So what the heck happened? 00:00:28.160 --> 00:00:32.720 A lot of major brands that we were used to seeing here in North America were domestically 00:00:32.720 --> 00:00:38.080 based and it's no secret that tons of manufacturing has left the United States and is now based 00:00:38.080 --> 00:00:43.760 in China. You can learn about the rise of Chinese electronics in this video, but it doesn't tell the whole 00:00:43.760 --> 00:00:47.600 story of what specifically happened to those old TV makers. 00:00:47.600 --> 00:00:52.720 To a large extent, the US TV industry became architects of their own demise. 00:00:52.720 --> 00:00:57.600 Although major American TV manufacturers once were global brands, they couldn't sell in 00:00:57.600 --> 00:01:03.760 every major market. And a very important one, Japan, had serious legal hurdles that made it tough for foreign 00:01:03.760 --> 00:01:10.240 companies to sell products there. So instead, they licensed their tech out to Japanese electronics firms, hoping to reap 00:01:10.240 --> 00:01:19.080 profits off of royalties. But instead, Japanese companies took the technology and actually improved on it. 00:01:19.080 --> 00:01:23.720 And before long, Japanese TVs entered the US market and began to steamroll the American 00:01:23.720 --> 00:01:29.080 brands. In the US, the TV industry was viewed as mature, and the attitude among the folks in charge 00:01:29.080 --> 00:01:32.320 was, hey, what we have is good enough for everybody. 00:01:32.320 --> 00:01:35.560 So let's just focus on marketing and cost efficiency. 00:01:35.560 --> 00:01:42.640 Cha-ching. But obviously, we're no longer watching massive tube TVs in wooden cabinets. 00:01:42.640 --> 00:01:47.980 Japanese brands believed a better strategy was to continue innovating, imagine that. 00:01:47.980 --> 00:01:52.080 And sure enough, they introduced models that were higher quality and more lightweight thanks 00:01:52.080 --> 00:01:55.200 to their use of transistors instead of vacuum tubes. 00:01:55.200 --> 00:02:01.800 In fact, between 1970 and 1976, Japanese brands like Sony and Panasonic tripled their market 00:02:01.800 --> 00:02:05.400 share in the US, capturing nearly one half of it. 00:02:05.400 --> 00:02:09.680 Zenith's response, however, wasn't to pour more money into development to make their 00:02:09.680 --> 00:02:16.200 own products better, but instead to take the Japanese companies to court for supposed antitrust 00:02:16.200 --> 00:02:25.680 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 00:02:25.680 --> 00:02:33.960 lost anyways. Making matters even worse, the US companies failed to see the potential of emerging TV-related 00:02:33.960 --> 00:02:41.600 technologies. For example, Sony started working on a low-cost VCR back in 1956, way before they even knew 00:02:41.600 --> 00:02:47.620 there would be a demand for it. American electronic companies at the time typically took a much more conservative approach 00:02:47.700 --> 00:02:51.540 by trying to ensure through consumer studies that there would be a market for something 00:02:51.540 --> 00:02:57.220 before they produced it, which ended up biting them as foreign manufacturers were effectively 00:02:57.220 --> 00:03:02.980 creating new markets, and VCRs became much more widespread than the disk-based technology 00:03:02.980 --> 00:03:08.820 the American companies were working on. Now this put even more financial pressure on American companies who didn't have as 00:03:08.820 --> 00:03:14.560 many product segments to compete in, and the Domino's, they began falling, baby. 00:03:14.640 --> 00:03:20.000 Zenith was bought by Korea-based LG in 1995, and no longer makes TVs. 00:03:20.000 --> 00:03:25.160 RCA only exists as a brand name now owned by a company based here in Canada. 00:03:25.160 --> 00:03:29.400 And Magnavox is now also a minor brand owned by a Japanese company. 00:03:29.400 --> 00:03:33.200 It was taken over by a couple of entrepreneurs from Tennessee, but then went bankrupt in 00:03:33.200 --> 00:03:38.940 2004 after China was admitted to the WTO a few years prior, and started exporting TVs 00:03:38.940 --> 00:03:45.780 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 00:03:45.780 --> 00:03:50.960 disappeared in huge part because many of them were just standing still. 00:03:50.960 --> 00:03:55.360 Good times simply don't last if you don't do anything to innovate. 00:03:55.360 --> 00:04:01.560 In fact, we're thinking about moving TechWiki off of YouTube and just full time onto TikTok. 00:04:01.560 --> 00:04:05.120 Maybe that'll work. You just gotta keep moving. We're not doing that. 00:04:05.120 --> 00:04:09.760 That's not gonna happen. Alright, that's it for this video guys. Hey, thanks for watching. 00:04:09.760 --> 00:04:16.960 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. 00:04:16.960 --> 00:04:17.600 Also subscribe.