material used to make discs was not sturdy enough for manufacture. Signal degradation was an issue, as handling the discs was causing them to deteriorate more rapidly than expected, baffling engineers. Adding onto the issues was the length of the discs; sixty minutes per side rendered it impossible for most movies over 120 minutes to be released on one CED disc. This was easily attainable on VHS and Betamax, as a T-120 VHS, for example (which holds two hours and four minutes of tape), could carry most of these movies. However, this was not the case on CED. Many popular films such as some of the James Bond series, Mary Poppins, Return of the Jedi and Star Trek: The Motion Picture had to be released on two CED discs. All three of these examples were typically seen on one VHS/Betamax cassette. RCA had projected that by 1985, CED players would be in close to 50% of American homes, but the sales of players continued to drop. RCA cut the prices of CED players and offered incentives to consumers such as rebates and free discs, but sales only slightly improved. RCA management realized that the system would never be profitable and announced the discontinuation of production of CED players on April 4, 1984. Remaining stocks of players were sold by dealers and liquidation retailers for as little as $20 each. Unexpectedly, demand for the videodiscs themselves suddenly became high immediately after the announcement; RCA alerted dealers and customers that videodiscs would continue to be manufactured and new titles released for at least another three years after the discontinuation of players. Less than a year after this announcement, the sale of discs began to decline, prompting RCA to abandon videodisc production after only two years, in 1986. The last titles released were The Jewel of the Nile by CBS/Fox Video, and Memories of VideoDisc, a commemorative CED given to many RCA employees involved with the CED project, both in 1986. Technology CEDs are conductive vinyl platters that are in diameter. To avoid metric names they are usually called "12 inch discs". A CED has a spiral groove on both sides. The groove is 657 nm wide and has a length of up to 12 miles (19 km). The discs rotate at a constant angular speed during playback (450 rpm for NTSC, 375 rpm for PAL) and each rotation contains 8 interlaced fields,