However, there were also some specific factors at work in the television field which mitigated against archiving. The most important were technical: the earliest television transmissions were all live and the technology to record them did not exist. Thus, all that remains of the BBC’s television service from before the World War II are some specially shot films made to illustrate the service. Indeed, the earliest remaining television materials are items shot on film and the first archives of television materials were company film libraries. In the late 1940s the technique of telerecording, also known as kinescoping, allowed the recording of transmissions on film. In the United States, this allowed the delayed transmission of programs in different time zones, and thus substantial amounts of material survive. Elsewhere, particularly in Britain, the expense meant that only the most prestigious productions and events were recorded. There was still also the feeling that the bulk of output was not worth preserving, combined with the fact that, being originally a medium developed to transmit moving pictures over a distance as the action happened, there was no such tradition anyway. In addition, the early lack of any possibility that materials would be repeated, partly because of agreements with entertainment unions, mitigated against archiving. The material being kept was mostly factual, especially news reports, which had a clear reuse and historic value.

Again, it is the output of the U.S. networks in the 1950s which has survived the best, another reason being the policy of selling programming to other countries developing their own television services. The fact that Lucille Ball and Phil Silvers still regularly appear on cable channels throughout the world has a lot to do with this fact.

At the end of the 1950s, the development of videotape gave the possibility of archiving on a larger scale, while its expense and the fact that it could be wiped and reused kept the situation uncertain. Every country has its favorite examples of material that has been lost. In the United States it is the first Super Bowl. In Britain the cult science fiction series Dr. Who has almost 100 lost episodes. Nevertheless, more material survives from the 1960s than from before and the growing academic interest in the medium attracted the attention of some of the major public archives already dealing with film.

By the mid-1970s, television archiving was becoming firmly established, and the foundation of an International Federation of Television Archives (FIAT/ IFTA) in 1977 testifies to its spread. The most significant archives were those owned by the companies producing the programs. In the United States, these ranged from the news and sports archives of the three main networks to the Hollywood and other production houses that made the rest of the programming. In Europe, where the initial model was single state broadcasters producing all their own programming, followed by the spasmodic introduction of similar commercial broadcasters, company archiving became more centralized. Nevertheless, the commercial nature of the business meant that cultural archives of television programs, and the public access that follows, had to be provided elsewhere.

It is still the case that most countries do not have publicly funded archives of television programs in the way that they do have such archives of film productions. In those countries where such archives do exist, they have often been provided by the same organizations that already ran the film archives. This is certainly the case in Britain, where the National Film Archive, run by the British Film Institute (BFI), began collecting television material at the end of the 1950s and expanded its operation to such an extent that, in 1993, it changed its name to the National Film and Television Archive. This also reflected the fact that legislation and regulation had made it the central national archive for the output of the three main commercial channels, which came either from regional companies in the case of ITV or independent producers in the cases of Channels 4 and 5. The archive’s responsibilities are preservation and public access and most material is acquired by recording transmissions, thus ensuring that the complete flow of images, including commercial breaks and promotions, is captured and preserved. A separate agreement with the BBC, which has had its own archival responsibilities imposed by government since 1979, allows for public access to the corporation’s output through the BFI.

In the United States the situation is considerably more fragmented and a national survey by the Library of Congress in 1997 identified hundreds of collections of television programs, reflecting the enormous national production and highlighting the need for the coordination of preservation and access. The most significant public collections are those of the Library itself, the UCLA Film and Television Archive, and the Museum of Broadcasting, though, in the absence of federal legislation, acquisition has of necessity been spasmodic and opportunistic. Academic institutions often end up with significant specialist collections, such as the Political Commercial Archive at the University of Oklahoma.

In some other countries, especially in Scandinavia, there are laws of legal deposit for television programs, though in most there is nothing other than the company archives, most of which remain available for commercial use only. Probably the most interesting solution is in France, where the Institut National de l’ A udiovisuel (INA) has the right of legal deposit of all television production and assumes the exploitation rights to much of the material it acquires after a number of years, thus making it a significant production house as well as a comprehensive national resource and study center. In the Netherlands the National Audiovisual Archive (NAA) has combined the resources of the main broadcasters and public archives.

At the end of the 1980s all television archives, company and public, woke up to the biggest problem they now face: the obsolescence of video formats. The first dominant video format, two-inch Quadruplex, which had been standard from the late 1950s to the early 1980s, had been superseded by one-inch formats and the technology was no longer being supported by the companies that had manufactured it. Since then, newer formats have followed at dizzying speeds, the latest being small gauge, highly compressed digital videocassettes, which themselves are being supplanted by disc and file formats. The only way to preserve the images in these circumstances is to transfer them to a current format, though the choices involved are difficult and the likelihood of having to do the transfer again as newer formats emerge is high. The scale of the problem is enormous and a large amount of the world’s two-inch recordings still remain to be transferred.

One factor in the archives’ favor is the explosion in television delivery methods, causing a massive rise in the number of channels requiring product to fill them, at the same time as there is a seemingly insatiable appetite for programming from the past. In these circumstances, the reuse of archival material is a massive operation, though the danger that only the material that is regarded as commercially viable will be transferred and preserved is a very real one. Public funding will be required on a large scale if the cultural archives’ collections are to survive.

Digital technology is also bringing major changes to television archive operations. Traditional cataloging methods are being supplanted by metadata attached to the digital images themselves, requiring the archive’s documentalists to become involved at the production stage, rather than, as traditionally, after transmission. News in particular is becoming a fully digital operation and it is no surprise that the first archive to implement a full digitization policy and make its catalog available on the Internet is that of CNN. Of course, the technology needed to support such operations is notoriously even more unreliable than videotape in terms of its longevity and future compatibility with currently operating models.

Having fought hard to establish themselves and their operations, television archives thus face an uncertain future. At least it is now realized that, for both commercial and cultural reasons, the preservation and continuing accessibility of archival television material is a necessity.