Sponsor (Sept-Dec 1958)

Television heads for transition as vide ^ A half dozen tv commercial producers, the three networks and 43 stations are the spearhead for tape ^ Advertisers are quick to grasp its possibilities, are starting to move in on national as well as on local levels f\n atomic bomb detonated in the Anipex Corp. suite at Chicago's Conrad Hilton hotel during the April 1956 convention of NARTB (now NAB) could not have had more far-reaching effects on broadcast advertising than did the unveiling of the Ampex videotape recorder. Within five days, this West Coast manufacturer had over $4 million in advance orders on its books. Why? What could possibly explain such spontaneoeus acceptance? What brought some admen and tv producers, who had planned to forego the convention, suddenly winging into Chicago? It wasn't as if the idea of videotape was new. A number of laboratories had already shown that sight and sound could be mixed on the same tape that previously had been in wide use for sound alone. The only trouble had been that to do it you'd wind up with reels of tape the size of cartwheels which would have to be changed every few minutes. The Ampex "bombshell" was the fact that pix-and-audio could be packed on practical-size reels. For the tv industry, the invention was comparable with the discovery of pasteurization or penicillin in medicine. In the two-and-one-half years since, Ampex has produced and delivered about $8 million worth of recorders alone, not to mention its sales of tape and parts. By the beginning of 1959, this volume should swell to $12.5 mil I'r.Hlii, , r take up tape: Fi al at its New York studios: promotes its new service as "Delayed Live Broadcasts"