Years before the format war between VHS and Betamax, and decades before DVDs came onto the scene, there was film. But film was hard to use and eventually videotape was invented. It was much faster to edit than film and speeded up the news business. But these first video machines were so big that they were stationary, and the roving reporters of the world stuck to film until portable versions eventually appeared. The first portable broadcast recorder, which had a huge backpack in which the tape sat, allowed news to be filmed on video outside a studio, although at a lower quality than film.
The videotape was stored on reels, just like film, but this changed in 1971 when Sony released the U- Matic video recorder. The U-Matic had been designed for home use, and the tape was in cassette form, which made it easy to handle, although the units themselves were heavy and expensive—so heavy and expensive that after trying to sell them to consumers in Japan, Sony had a go at selling them to businesses in the United States. Unfortunately the quality was so much lower than professional standards that broadcasting companies could not use them.
In 1974CBS,a U.S. broadcaster, asked Sony to make a version of the U-Matic for broadcasters. After more than a year of development, Sony delivered the Broadcasting Video series in 1976. Combining the shooting, recording, and editing into the one unit, it was built to match what the customer needed and this is what made it successful. Before the end of the decade, film was disappearing from newsrooms and electronic news gathering had emerged.
