VIDEOTAPE
Videotape changed news reporting. It gave coverage greater
immediacy and eventually it allowed more people to participate in newsgathering. But at the outset the technology was
so cumbersome and expensive that it seemed impractical.
In 1956, CBS-TV affiliates watched in Chicago as Ampex
exhibited the first commercially viable quadruplex Video
Tape Recorder (VTR). The machine weighed almost half a
ton, cost about $90,000, and recorded images only in blackand-white. Over the next four years, as prices declined,
Ampex sold six hundred VTRs, most to the major television networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, which used them
to cover such news events as President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s inauguration in 1957. The technology continued to
improve as machines became lighter and recorded in color,
and by 1959, it was being used more frequently in news
reporting. In Moscow at the American National Exhibition,
an Ampex VTR recorded in color Vice President Richard
Nixon’s so-called “kitchen debate” with Soviet Premiere
Nikita Khrushchev. In November, 1963, videotape did not
capture John F. Kennedy’s assassination—that was shot on
an 8mm home movie camera by Abraham Zapruder—but it
did record the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby.
And it also played an important role in the television coverage of the Kennedy funeral that helped bind the nation
together in a shared experience. NBC, for example, used
more than twenty VTRs in its reporting of events in the terrible hours following the president’s death.
The advantages of videotape became clear to newsmen.
It could record sound synchronously with images, and they
could be played back at once, and if necessary, edited, all
without the usual prolonged chemical processing involved
with film. Television stations could erase videotape and
reused it over and over again. Videotape also added spontaneity and timeliness to TV news coverage. Certainly 8mm
and 16mm film had earlier speeded news reporting, but
videotape provided even greater immediacy. “Video is …
instantaneous, electronic, and replayable” on many different screens simultaneously, said an early proponent of the
medium (Price 1972, 4). The Oswald shooting, which was
carried live on TV, was then rebroadcast by television stations around the country only seconds after it happened.
Videotaped changed other types of reporting and broadcasting. With its ability to offer instant replay, it transformed
sports coverage during the 1960s. CBS, for example, used
instant replay in covering the Army-Navy football game
in December, 1963, a game called by the well-known
announcer Lindsay Nelson. Instant replay greatly increased
the popularity of football on television. In 1964, CBS bought
the rights to televise National Football League games and
recouped its investment quickly when Ford Motor Company and Philip Morris agreed to sponsor the broadcasts.
Advertisers liked videotape, too, and it soon replaced film
in most television commercials. By 1965, about one in three
TV shows were videotaped. During the 1960s, the number
of TV stations that used VTRs increased about six fold. In
the decade that followed, the stations with this technology
more than doubled again.
Despite the advantages and increasing popularity of
videotape, many reporters during the 1960s and 1970s had
reservations about the medium. A number of people who
worked in television still preferred film over videotape
because they found it easier to play and it could store more
content than magnetic tape. During the 1967 Arab-Israeli
War, newsmen found film cheaper and easier edit than videotape. During the 1970s, many local television reporters
continued to weigh the pros and cons of using videotape
versus film. The technology “was big and bulky,” recalled
one reporter who first saw videotape in 1976 while working
in Rockford, Illinois. “The camera operator and audio guy
were tethered together. A hand held 16mm film camera was
actually more flexible but not as instantaneous.”
Social and political activists tended to be enthusiastic
about videotape during the 1960s. Some of them believed
that videotape would bring “an image-making revolution
equal to” the ones produced in still photography by Kodak
and Polaroid, and they thought that videotape (and other
portable media such as 8mm and 16mm cameras) could
augment the underground press. Filmmaker Jonas Mekas
wrote about the revolutionary potential of these media for
The Village Voice and proposed using them to develop an
alternative journalism that would reveal the true nature of
the Vietnam War, expose racism, and publicize the deplorable conditions in prisons and asylums. Still other activists
foresaw a day when the technology would become more
affordable and the VTR would become a powerful instrument to “create a video democracy” (Armstrong 1981, 72).
Some expected that it would make “censorship nearly powerless” (Youngblood 19970, 114).
During the 1960s, the technology was still too costly for
most people to own—indeed, Time magazine reported in
1965 that “few Americans” had ever seen a recorder. That
would soon change, however. In 1965, Sony introduced the
Portapak, a portable video recorder and camera that was
less expensive and lighter than TV video cameras. It cost
from $1,000 to $3,000 compared to the $10,000 to $20,000
needed for the TV camera. Some compared the Portapak’s
empowerment of independent cameramen and individual
citizens to the portable Bolex 16mm film camera used during the early 1940s, or to offset printing that changed newspaper publishing during the 1960s.
Videotape became more and more accessible to both
professionals and ordinary citizens during the latter third of
the twentieth century and early twenty-first century. Professional cameramen liked it better than film because they felt
it allowed them to report on real people in a more authentic manner. With the appearance of ever more mobile and
inexpensive technology, such as video surveillance cameras
and camcorders, there was a veritable explosion in citizenproduced images used in news reports. One of the major
news stories of 1991, for example, was made possible by
the amateur videotape made of Los Angeles police officers
beating Rodney King. In 2004, home video shot during the
Christmas Day tsunami following the Sumatran earthquake
provided some of the most powerful images of this catastrophe. By the early twenty-first century, the technology had
developed to the point where literally millions of people
were capable of recording events. The technology posed
serious challenges for journalists and the public as they
attempted to assess which of the events they watched were
truly newsworthy and which ones were not.
Further Reading
Armstrong, David. A Trumpet to Arms: Alternative Media in
America. Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher, Inc., 1981.
Barnouw, Erik. Image Empire: A History of Broadcasting in the
United States: Volume III — from 1953. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1970.
Block, Jerry. “How NBC-TV Newsreel Crews Filmed the IsraeliArab War.” American Cinematograher, 48 (December
1967), 868.
Bluth, Joseph E. “More Facts About Vidtronics,” American Cinematographer, 48 (November 1967), 803.
Daniel, Eric D., C. Denis Mee, and Mark H. Clark, eds. Magnetic
Recording: The First 100 Years. New York: IEEE Press,
1999.
Fischel, Robert. “Color Film Preferred.” American Cinematographer, 46 (January 1965): 46.
Hearst, Jr., William Randolph, Frank Conniff, and Bob Considine. Khrushchev and the Russian Challenge. New York:
Avon Book Division, 1960, 1961, 167–72 (original title Ask
Me Anything — Our Adventures with Khrushchev, McGrawHill Book Company).
Junker, Howard. “Underground Channels.” New Republic, 157
(September 9, 1967), 33–34.
Marlow, Eugene, and Eugene Secunda. Shifting Time and Space:
The Story of Videotape. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1991.
Mekas, Jonas. Movie Journal : The Rise of the New American
Cinema, 1959–1971. New York: Macmillan Company, 1972,
132–136, 186–188, 235–236.
Pierce, Bill. “Videotape: Tomorrow’s 35-mm?: A Still Photographer Makes the Transition from 35-mm to Electronic
Filming in a Week End.” Popular Photography, 57 (August
1965), 90–91.
Price, Jonathan. Video-Visions: A Medium Discovers Itself. New
York: New American Library, 1972, 1977.
Rush, Michael. Video Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 2003.
Stockert, Hank. “Is Filming Technology Losing Ground?” American Cinematographer, 46 (April, 1965), 228.
“Taping Untapped Markets,” Time, 85 (February 19, 1965),
90–92.
Youngblood, Gene. Underground Cinema. New York: E. P. Dutton Co., Inc., 1970.
Stephen Vaughn