Videotape

Videotape is a means of recording television pictures and accompanying sound onto magnetic tape as opposed to movie film. The first practical professional videotape machines were made by Ampex in the United States in the 1950s and employed a helical scan system to provide the high-speed tape-to-head contact necessary to record the high frequencies used in television pictures. The BBC experimented with a high-speed linear videotape system called VERA but this was ultimately unsuccessful, and all subsequent videotape systems have used helical scan.

In the early 1970s the first domestic videocassette recorders were launched in Britain and America, but it was not until the end of the decade that the more successful Japanese rival systems VHS and Betamax were launched, resulting in what came to be known as the "format wars". VHS finally won, mainly due to the greater variety of pre-recorded movies available in the format.