Wiping (magnetic tape)

Wiping, also known as junking, is a colloquial term for action taken by radio and television production and broadcasting companies, in which old audiotapes, videotapes, and telerecordings (kinescopes), are erased, reused, or destroyed. Although the practice was once very common, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, wiping is now practiced much less frequently. Older video and audio formats took up much more storage space than modern digital video or audio files, making their retention more costly, thus increasing the incentive of discarding existing broadcast material to recover storage space for newer programmes.

The advent of domestic audiovisual playback technology (e.g., videocassette and DVD) has made wiping less beneficial, with broadcasters and production houses realizing both the economic and cultural value of keeping archived material for both rebroadcast and potential profits through release on home video.

Australian broadcasters did not gain access to videotape-recording technology until the early 1960s, and as a result nearly all programmes prior to that were broadcast live-to-air. Very little programming survives from the earliest years of Australian TV (1956–1960), as kinescope recording to film was expensive and most of what was recorded in this way has since been lost or destroyed. Some early programmes have survived, however; for example, ATN-7, a Sydney station, prerecorded (via kinescopes) some of their 1950s output such as Autumn Affair (1958–1959), The Pressure Pak Show (1957–1958) and Leave it to the Girls (1957–1958); some of these kinescopes have survived and are now held by the National Film and Sound Archive, with soap opera Autumn Affair surviving near-intact, likely one of the earliest Australian series for which this is the case.

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