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. 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 next format to gain widespread usage was the 1" C-format videotape. It introduced features such as shuttling and still framing.

The first video cassettes

Then, in 1969, Sony introduced the first widespread video cassette (prior formats had used open reels), the 3/4" composite U-matic system, which it later refined to Broadcast Video U-matic or BVU. Sony continued its hold on the professional market with its ever-expanding 1/2" component video Betacam family (introduced in 1982), which, in its digital variants, is still among the market leaders. Panasonic had some limited success with ist MII system, but never could compare to Betacam in terms of market share.

Home VCRs

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. VHS is still the leading consumer VCR format, since its follow-ups S-VHS and D-VHS never caught up on popularity.