Old Live TV Broadcasts - How do recordings exist?? (1 Viewer)

I always thought that old TV shows that were done live were done so because there was no recording media. If that's true, then how do we have copies of them now? And if they did have recording equipment, why didn't they tape the shows and broadcast them like they do now? In the movie Contact they show a clip of the very first television broadcast (Hitler in Germany). Is the clip they show the real thing or is it a clip of something that was put on film? If it's the real deal, how was that recorded??

What sometimes happened was a kinescope was made. This is essentially filming a TV monitor while the program is going on. The quality is dubious to shabby, but at least it exists.

They had recording devices back then, but not video recording systems. Anything visual would have been recorded on film.

The Nazi's had magnetic recording in WWII, and there was a device called a wire recorder, but these were for sound, not video.

If the performance wasn't filmed, then it was, as Mark said, a kinescope.

i thought the earliest forms of recording were done on those round cylinders?

edit - check out this article on recording history

Most of the live shows were only live in New York, were kinescoped for rebroadcast on the West Coast.

The broadcast of Hitler openning the Olympics shown in Contact was most probably actually a film of the same event made to look like video, there was no such thing as video tape then. The Germans did have remote tv trucks. They would photograph stuff with film cameras, process the film quickly on the truck, and relay it to the transmitters. They also used the Eiffel Tower in Paris during the occupation to broadcast tv signals, some of which were actually picked up by the Brits and used to evaluate bombing effectiveness.

There were no video cameras at Pearl Harbor, though RCA had developed broadcast tv and was actually selling sets in the New York area before WWII.