quadruplex videotape

2-inch quadruplex videotape (also called 2″ quad, or just quad, for short) was the first practical and commercially successful analog recording videotape format. It was developed and released for the broadcast television industry in 1956 by Ampex, an American company based in Redwood City, California. This format revolutionized broadcast television operations and television production, since the only recording medium available to the TV industry before then was film used for kinescopes, which was much more costly to utilize and took time to develop at a film laboratory. In addition, kinescope images were usually of obviously inferior quality to the live television broadcast images they recorded, whereas quadruplex videotape preserved almost all the image detail of a live broadcast.