I worked for the old RCA SMirnoff Lab in Princeton as an "AMTS" when GE bought RCA. That was late 1985. A couple of years after RCA dropped about $600 million on that videodisc format that bombed. Today DVDs are very popular, go figure....
Ge was after RCA's defence contracting and TV network NBC. Consumer electronics they didn't really want that. Like when you have to buy an entire box of stuff that contains one or two items you desire, and the rest you toss....
As for the Smirnoff R&D lab, "R&D lab, we don't need no stinkin' R&D lab!" They were going to close it down but some politicians from New Jersey did some arm twisting (Sarnoff was to be the flagship of NJ's 'Silicon valley of the east'). They unloaded it on SRI International as a tax writeoff thing. But they still canned about half of us there. Guess having 11 patents didn't mean anything. It was a great place to work before GE; I'm still a bit mad at GE. Haven't bought any GE products since....
Nowadays "RCA" is a rather meaningless trademark.