RCA Photophone

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RCA Photophone Inc.

Company type	Subsidiary
Founded	1928
Defunct	1983
Headquarters	411 Fifth Avenue, New York City, New York
Products	Sound-on-film technology
Parent	Radio Corporation of America

RCA Photophone was the trade name given to one of four major competing technologies that emerged in the American film industry in the late 1920s for synchronizing electrically recorded audio to a motion picture image. RCA Photophone was an optical sound, "variable-area" film exposure system, in which the modulated area (width) corresponded to the waveform of the audio signal. The four other major technologies were the Warner Bros. Vitaphone sound-on-disc system, as well as three "variable-density" sound-on-film systems, Lee De Forest's Phonofilm, and Fox-Case's Movietone, and the German system Tri-Ergon.

When Joseph P. Kennedy and other investors merged Film Booking Offices of America (FBO) with the Keith-Albee-Orpheum theater chain and Radio Corporation of America; the resulting movie studio RKO Radio Pictures used RCA Photophone as its primary sound system. In March 1929, RKO released Syncopation, the first live-recorded film made with RCA Photophone.