[rsynnott]

European TVs generally used SCART cables (a sort of 1970s analog HDMI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCART), from the 1980s until HDMI took over. It was, indeed, fairly common for a TV or VCR or games console to have _only_ SCART.

Odd standard; it had both composite and RGB lines, but also control lines, so, like HDMI-CEC, you could set it up so that your VCR couldn’t quite control your TV. It also supported daisy-chaining, a bit like SCSI, so you could connect your TV to your VCR and your VCR to your DVD player.

Even before SCART, European TV equipment tended to use DIN (you may remember this as the IBM AT keyboard connector) rather than RCA.

Oddly, there was a brief period where it was somewhat common for early HD TVs to have component RCA connectors; while SCART did support HD component, people apparently did not trust it.

[bsimpson]

I feel like the US has a history of inventing a thing and having an early version of it become popular. By the time it's mainstream in Europe, it has been improved and standardized, giving the appearance that Europe has more modern technology.

Perhaps the most famous example of this is magstripe card in the US vs EMV chip cards in Europe. The US had credit cards first, but standardized on swiping magnetic stripes. By the time they were widespread in Europe, the technology had advanced, so someone from the 2000s might think Europe did credit cards better. (The M and the V in EMV actually stand for the American companies MasterCard and VISA.)

I wonder if there's a term for this phenomenon.

[rsynnott]

In both cases, this is due to government regulation, not first-mover disadvantage. TVs showed up at about the same time in Europe and the US (first working TV was in the UK, and first regular TV station was in the US, but you’re talking about a year or so’s difference). SCART became a thing because the French government required companies to support it from 1980 on; previously European TVs generally used DIN.

As for the cards, again you can thank France; Cartes Bancaires introduced a predecessor to EMV in the 80s, and France moved quite quickly to make chip cards standard and then mandatory. Other countries followed in the 90s and early noughties. However, by the time EMV predecessors launched, there’d been credit cards in Europe since the 1960s (usually national standards).

Incidentally, this is also indirectly why the US was so late to the party with tap to pay. With chip and pin via EMV, it became essential that card terminals be available to the customer; an employee taking the card in the back wasn’t an option. So by the time tap to pay was introduced in the late noughties, more or less all shops and restaurants already had either counter-mounted or portable terminals, so it was an easy transition. In the US, it was more common to have swipe machines not necessarily directly accessible to the customer, which made tap to pay less attractive, and it didn’t really become near-universal until Apple and Google Pay forced the issue (actually, even then it didn’t become universal; I was in SF last year and was in a surprisingly large number of places which only had swipe machines).

[bsimpson]

Tap to pay felt like it took off in the US as a reaction to the germ hysteria of the pandemic. Swiping a card was arguably more convenient than getting out and unlocking your phone. There wasn't much demand for it here when it was popular in e.g. Singapore.

The amount of time people spend holding (rather than pocketing) their phones is also probably higher than it was in the 2010s, so the cost of digging it out of your purse/pocket is less relevant.

[meta] Having a conversation about credit card and video standards in a thread about managerial layoffs feels apropos to how my brain works about other curious topics. We're basically cosplaying a Wikipedia hole.

[rsynnott]

So in Europe for a long time, tap to pay was normally via _card_, not phone. I don’t think there was a common phone-based EMVish standard before Apple and Google Pay came out (there were a few weird stored value things), but tap-able EMV cards showed up around 2007 (again, there were various local and national proprietary stored value cards before that, but in most cases they never really caught on).

Another factor may be that American card terminals were traditionally quite slow, or at least vendors rarely prioritised speed (I have no idea _why_ this was the case, but it definitely seems to have been the case). Tap to pay really works best if the auth can happen within a second or so.

[Macha]

In Ireland (and I guess the UK), we'd have a lot of TVs with both. Usually they'd have multiple SCART connectors, but only a single RCA connector. It was common for stuff like games consoles to ship with a RCA to SCART adapter.

I will say in terms of physical connectors, by the later years it was quite common to have poor connectivity with SCART - stiff cables leaving the connector at an angle that would gradually lever it out of the socket, the flat pins that would break off after repeated insertions...

[rsynnott]

> Usually they'd have multiple SCART connectors, but only a single RCA connector

I'm in Ireland as well, but I remember that as a high-end TV thing, mostly, though it did get more common towards the end of the analog connector era, especially for flatscreen TVs. Your generic 21" CRT TV usually just had a single SCART connector and a tuner connector, tho.

I suspect that the reason RCA (especially _component_ RCA) became more common in the flat-screen/early HD era was largely that, while SCART supported component output, the UX tended to be really bad, and there was no way for the TV to signal support to the attached device. So, virtually all set top boxes and DVD players could output RGB component via SCART, but this was never turned on by default, and the user wasn't necessarily aware of it.

[Macha]

Two SCART was pretty common, for e.g. a VHS player and a sky box. We definitely had switcher boxes we needed to use to connect game consoles, (or dvd players when they became a thing) up though.

I think some VHS players also had some form of pass through/switching capability of their own? It's been a while.

[rsynnott]

Yeah, most VCRs, except for really cheap ones, had the pass through ability. You could theoretically chain an arbitrary number of devices, though at the best of times controlling any of this was virtually impossible.

You’d normally want your sky/cablelink box connected through your vcr, so that you could record off the box, not connected separately to the tv.