Jason LefkowitzIn the earliest days of television most shows were broadcast live, because everything was technically much simpler that way. So television was a bit like the theatre — the curtain would go up, the show would occur, and when the curtain came down, the whole enterprise would vanish into memory.
But even though there was no easy way to pre-record a television program, there were still cases where producers might want to preserve a copy of a live program; to allow affiliates who weren’t connected to the live network to retransmit it, to give affiliates the opportunity to rebroadcast at a different time than the live air time, or just to save it for the historians.
Eventually this problem would be solved by the invention of videotape, but practical videotape systems didn’t come along until the mid-‘50s. So before then, producers used a much less elegant solution: the kinescope. A kinescope was just a 16mm or 35mm film camera pointed at a TV monitor; when the show aired live, the kinescope would record a copy of it onto film, which could then be copied and distributed using all the familiar tools filmmakers used to distribute film. The quality sucked, and the whole system was so rickety it’s a miracle it ever worked at all. But for a decade plus, it was the only record anyone was making of the otherwise completely ephemeral world of television.
This YouTube channel is dedicated to aggregating and presenting old kinescope recordings of all kinds. It’s a fascinating archive of what television was like in the years when television was still trying to figure that out for itself.
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