Videotape is a means of recording television pictures and accompanying sound onto magnetic tape as opposed to movie film. The first practical professional videotape machines were the Quad machines introduced by Ampex in the United States in 1956. Quad employed a helical scan system on a two-inch (5 cm) tape to provide the high-speed tape-to-head contact necessary to record the large amount of information used in television pictures. The BBC experimented with a high-speed linear videotape system called VERA but this was ultimately unsuccessful, and all subsequent videotape systems have used helical scan.

Although Quad became the industry standard for 20 years, it had drawbacks such as an inability to freeze pictures, and in early machines, a tape could only reliably be played back using the same set of hand-made tape heads, which wore out very quickly. Despite these problems, Quad could produce excellent images. Unfortunately, very few early videotapes still exist. The high cost of early videotapes meant that most broadcasters erased and reused them, and regarded videotape as simply a better and more cost-effective means of time-delaying broadcasts than the previous kinescope technology, which recorded television pictures onto photographic film. However, some early broadcast videotapes have survived, including The Edsel Show , broadcast live in 1957, and 1958's An Evening With Fred Astaire , the oldest color broadcast videotape known to exist.

The first domestic videocassette recorders were launched in the early 1970s, but it was not until the Japanese systems, Sony's Beta (1975) and JVC's VHS, were launched, that videotape moved into the mass market, resulting in what came to be known as the "format wars". VHS finally won, mainly due to its longer recording time compared to Beta.