We mostly didn't have RCA jacks in Europe when I grew up.
But nevermind; this is not the same.
Amazon largely consists of two internally grown businesses: Retail and AWS. They are wildly different.
But nevermind; this is not the same.
Amazon largely consists of two internally grown businesses: Retail and AWS. They are wildly different.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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...
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.
I think some VHS players also had some form of pass through/switching capability of their own? It's been a while.
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.
Amazon did it on a shorter timeline and shipped the usage before the infrastructure, but it's not as wildly different as you state. The same seed grew branches in different directions, whose tips ended up very far apart from one another.