> Now that I think of it, I think video recordings existed in the 70s too? The cliff note's version is that the BBC perfected filming live TV. It worked becaus

> Now that I think of it, I think video recordings existed in the 70s too? The cliff note's version is that the BBC perfected filming live TV. It worked because their analog version of deinterlacing 50 fields per second to 25 frames per second matched European film. But, in the US, where TV ran at 60 fields per second, filming it at 30fps was just too short of an exposure time. So video was favored in the US. A lot of pre-digital stuff was shot on film for various reasons. One reason is that 24/25fps film adapts very well to 50 fields per second or 60 frames per second; the consequence is a very minor speedup / slowdown. In contrast, it's a lot harder to adapt video between the two framerates with analog technologies. Edit: I also suspect cost may have had something to do with it. I suspect that film was cheaper than video in the 1970s, but someone who was around at the time might understand the cost difference between video versus film. I don't know if anyone "anticipated" HDTV in the 1970s, but back then artists did like putting their videos up on a big projected screen. At least in the 1990s, a lot of content, like Seinfeld and Friends, was done on film; both for the look, and so that it could be remastered for HDTV.