Does anybody remember for a while in the 80s where they had these special jukeboxes in a few locations where for 50 cents allows you to select from about 40 music videos to be played on a screen? I hear they used special Laserdiscs (along with CDs to play non-video tracks as it was I believe the first jukebox to use CDs instead of vinyl as well), were connected to a mainframe computer somewhere near Boston, and played about 12 commercials every hour. I believe the model was called LaserMusic, and was really cutting edge for its time.

http://s.ecrater.com/stores/31925/49e8922875ec3_31925n.jpg

Does anybody remember for a while in the 80s where they had these special jukeboxes in a few locations where for 50 cents allows you to select from about 40 music videos to be played on a screen?


I believe that's a Seeburg SCD-1 or some variant thereof.  I think it was audio-only, no video.  (But I could be wrong.  Is that the unit you remember?)

There was no way (in the 80s) to transmit video, or even audio, commercials over central computers.  I'm not sure how it was done, but if I were stuck with 80s-era tech, there was the ability to have a company ship a pre-recorded CD of hundreds of "commercials", load the CD into the jukebox, and have the jukebox phone the mothership to tell which songs had been played most frequently, and based on the contents of all the reports, ask the mosthership which commercials (based on which songs were the most popular) should be played.  Lemme dig a bit on that.

Your general recollection is correct.  There were jukeboxes based on laserdiscs - no CDs involved - back in the day. 

You may be thinking of the Videobox laserdisc jukebox.  I've seen one unit in working condition, it was primarily black, with gold trim, and an amber monochrome monitor for the user to select tracks.  (The actual video was played on a projection TV or other NTSC display device.)  This was emphatically not a wallmount unit - it had at least 30 full-size 12" laserdiscs stacked on a big spindle, and a jukebox-like mechanism would pick the appropriate laserdisc from the stack, feed it to the laserdisc player, and start cranking out the tunes and the video.

I'm pretty sure there were others.  I don't know if the Videobox could phone home - and I suspect that it couldn't.  Are you sure it was laserdisc-based and not VCD (video-CD) or DVD-based?  (These existed too!)

Yes it was definately called Videobox, I worked for the Company in 1989, they were based in NYC and we had one in every reese restaurant in NYC, very cool for it's time espicially during the height of MTV

Yes it was definately called Videobox, I worked for the Company in 1989, they were based in NYC and we had one in every reese restaurant in NYC, very cool for it's time espicially during the height of MTV


Thanks for the work - someone else took pictures of the gold-trimmed unit I was describing, which reminded me of where I saw it.  It was at California Extreme 2004; here are links to pictures of a Videobox, and here's the the stack of laserdiscs inside the Videobox laserdisc jukebox.