Ok, here goes nothing....

Select the Faces on the front of your VCR (the ones you want the texture applied to) and then change to your Front view, or the view that faces the the Selected faces.

Now before we go on. With the faces still selected go to:
Create>> Sets>> Quick Select Set...
Name it accordingly, and hit "Add to shelf"

Now you should have a button on your shelf that every time you click, it selects the faces on the front of your VCR.

Now with the Front faces selected and in the front view go to: Create UVs>> Planar Mapping (select the options Box) Now in the Option: Select "Bounding box" (not best plane.) and select "Camera" Now Also select "Keep Image Width/Hight Ratio" and also select: "Insert Projection Before Deformers." Then click "Project."

Now go to Window>> UV Texture editor.

You should see the UVs for the Front of the VCR which have not lost it's Aspect Ratio. Select the UV for the front of the VCR and move them of to the side, and then select the UVs for the rest of the VCR and move them of to the other side, then bring the Front VCR UVs back into the center. This will make sure that non of the text you apply to the front of the VCR appears on the rest of it.

Now in the UV texture editor go to: Polygons>> UV Snapshot...

Now the Snapshot options dialog box should pop up.
Just fill in the Details according to your preference.
Such as, 1024x1024 for the image size, and PNG for the format, also change the color value to blue or something equally as visible.
Now with the dialog bx still open select your VCR (in object mode) and then Click "OK" in the Snapshot Dialog box.

Open your UV snapshot in Photoshop, and make sure your text lines up the UVs.

Now save your Alpha image as a .Targa or .PNG

Now back in Maya open the Hyper Shade (Window>> Render Editors>> Hyper shade.)

Now in the Hyper shade, create a new Node and double click it to open the attribute Editor.
In the color channel click the checker box. when the "Create Render node" Dialog box opens. Make sure to select "Normal" not "as projection" or "as Stencil"
Then click the "File" node.

Now in the attribute editor, click on the small file icon next to image name to browse and select your image.

Now apply the texture to your VCR. Hit 6 on your key board to see the results.

Now you may notice that the image is showing up on the rest of the model.

Well thats an easy fix. Create a New node in the Hyper shade and apply it to the rest of the VCR (excluding the front.) This will keep things nice and clean while you complete the rest of the steps.

Now to achieve the effect that you are after you will need to create a Layered shader, and plug-in your textures.

To do this Open the hyper shade and crate a "layered shader" node. Double click it to view it's attributes. Now you should see a Red box with a small green Box inside of it. Now middle mouse button and drag the Base texture you want applied to the whole VCR into the Red box in the Layered Shaders attributes. Click the small x underneath the green box to delete it. Now Middle mouse Button and drag the Node with the Alpha image applied into the Red box also.

NOTE: Make sure that the Base texture is first followed by the image texture in the Layered shaders red box. This is very important if you want your Alpha image to show up.

Now apply the Layered shader to the Object. You wont be able to see the results in the view port any more, and will have to do Render to see them.

Now if the Alpha text is showing up on the model in any other place than the front of the VCR, Open the Hyper shade and select the base texture node, and in the hyper shad go to: Edit>> Duplicate>> Without network.

Now select the all the faces of your VCR (excluding the front) and apply this new Node.

NOTE: A quick way to select all those faces without selecting the front faces, is to use the Selection set you created earlier. Click on the Selection set button you put in the shelf, and this should select the front faces, now simply go to: Edit>> Invert selection.

Now this should give you the results that your after.

I hope this helped.

Take care