Why did RCA abandon further development of the CED system in April 1984?
At the end of 1983, RCA had sold fewer than 500,000 players total, when by earlier estimates they should have sold more than that in 1983 alone. They had also cut the price of the players on more than one occasion, and offered rebates, which assured that player manufacture would be operating in the red for several more years. The VCR was even more entrenched as the video delivery platform of choice, so it simply made economic sense to cease player manufacture. Disc manufacture was actually successful, since consumers were purchasing about twice as many discs annually as RCA had projected. This may have been the main reason RCA promised to continue disc production for an estimated 3 years after player manufacture ceased. The decision to discontinue the CED system was not attributable to a new chief executive at RCA, since Thornton Bradshaw was still in charge of RCA, as he had been for nearly the entire CED era. He was chosen to lead RCA in April 1981, just one month after the introduct
