[jagged-chisel]

When I learned how TV worked at the beginning of television history, I found it super cool that the camera and all the TVs across the country had their scanning beams synchronized. That camera was driving your TV, almost literally.

[eastbound]

I only recently found out that the tech to save images wasn’t invented, so they couldn’t display a revolving logo between shows. So… so the BBC had a permanent real-life logo with a permanent camera in front of it.

So yes, any image was extremely ephemeral at the time.

PS: Apparently it’s called a Noddy, it’s a video camera controlled by a servomotor to pan and tilt (or 'nod', hence the name Noddy): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noddy_(camera)

[kuhsaft]

I don’t think that was why the Noddy was used. At the time film and projection were available. They could have recorded film and projected onto a sensor for re-broadcast.

The Noddy was used since it was a live broadcast and “allowed the idents to be of no fixed length as the clock symbols could continue for many minutes at a time”.

So, it’s not really because they couldn’t store video. It’s because they needed an indefinite amount of video for the clock idents and couldn’t generate them digitally.

[jameshart]

Film wears out through repeated use. While a loop of film would have been theoretically possible, the tech to transmit it would have required just as much TV camera electronic equipment, plus a complex film projection device; the film would have gradually gotten scratched and picked up dust and worn out, and it would have had a great many failure modes.

In contrast, pointing a TV camera at a spinning globe was much easier. And for showing the time, pointing at a physical clock was much easier than, what, having twelve hours of film footage available and having to synch the right frame?

I think what’s maybe more surprising for people than that moving station idents were typically in camera props, is that broadcasting even a static image pre-digital was also much more easily accomplished by just pointing a camera at a piece of card - even repeating a single frame over and over again was not something that could be easily reproduced some other way; having a camera continually capture and immediately broadcast the frame was just much easier.

Video tape, once it came in, allowed freeze frames but continually reading from the same spot on a tape caused wear so you couldn’t rely on being able to show a single frame from tape indefinitely.

Digital freeze frame machines that could capture a frame of video and repeatedly play it back from a memory buffer only started showing up in the 1980s.