Instant Replay - History

History

During a 1955 Hockey Night in Canada broadcast on CBC Television, producer George Retzlaff used a "wet-film" (kinescope) replay, which aired several minutes later. Slow motion replay was initiated a few years later by ABC.

CBS Sports Director Tony Verna invented a system to enable a standard videotape machine to instantly replay on 7 December 1963, for the network's coverage of the Army–Navy Game. The instant replay machine weighed 1300 pounds. After technical hitches, the only replay broadcast was Rollie Stichweh's winning touchdown. It was replayed at the original speed, with commentator Lindsey Nelson advising viewers "Ladies and gentlemen, Army did not score again!"

Replay from analog disk storage was tried out by CBS in 1965, and commercialized in 1967 by the Ampex HS-100, which had a 30-second capacity and freeze frame capability.

Instant replay has been credited as a primary factor in the rise of televised football, although football was popular on television even before then. While one camera was set up to show the overall “live” action, other cameras, which were linked to a separate videotape machine, framed close-ups of key players. Within a few seconds of a crucial play, the videotape machine would replay the action from various, close-up angles, in slow motion.

Prior to instant replay, it was almost impossible to portray the essence of a football game on television. Viewers struggled to disseminate the action from a wide shot of the field, on a small black and white television screen. However, with replay technology, “brutal collisions became ballets, and end runs and forward passes became miracles of human coordination.” Thanks in large part to instant replay, televised football became evening entertainment, perfected by ABC-TV’s Monday Night Football, and enjoyed by a wide audience

Marshall McLuhan, the noted communication theorist, famously said that any new medium contains all prior media within it. McLuhan gave Tony Verna's invention of instant replay as a good example. "Until the advent of the instant replay, televised football had served simply as a substitute for physically attending the game; the advent of instant replay – which is possible only with the television – marks a post-convergent moment in the medium of television."