| When videotape recording first arrived in the late 1950s, much of the television industry welcomed the new technology. Magnetic tape promised to cut studio and station costs and expand the field of audiovisual possibilities available to producers and technicians. With sound and picture quality mimicking that of the live broadcast, tape retained the purported energy of live television. Yet its affordance of retakes and post-production editing offered security, much like film. What's more, this new mode allowed for some entirely novel techniques, including instant replay and timeshifting (or the recording of television broadcasts for later viewing). Consequently, the range of options produced by video called into question some of the lines already drawn between existing media forms and different areas of the entertainment industry.;This dissertation examines the first decade of video recording's implementation into American broadcasting. It argues that videotape played a significant role in altering both public and specialized attitudes toward audiovisual media, including what expectations one could reasonably expect to have of a unit of footage. Much of this has had to do with video as an inchoate, "informatic" medium. Simultaneously, the study of this early, analog period in video technology's history works as an exploration into the social construction of media ontology. As users and spectators deliberated over the nature and proper application of this new tool, its status and identity as medium slowly came into view.;The four chapters of the body are organized conceptually. The first concerns the scale and spread of videotape's implementation across the American broadcasting landscape, problematizing concepts of "public" and "user" that have marked later theorizations and assumptions about video. The second chapter analyzes labor disputes and uncertainties surrounding videotape, unions, and management as the format began to spread through the entertainment industry. Third, I look at the tight connections established between video recording and live broadcast in the 1950s, tracing out some of the long-standing implications derived from that association. Finally, the dissertation addresses experiments of videotape editing, and how different techniques and tools represented various conceptual approaches to the nature of the medium. |
