How exactly were foreign shows like anime aired on American TV?
So companies buy licenses to air certain shows from their countries of origin but what then? Do American broadcast networks receive a shipped USB drive containing high quality episodes straight from Japan to stream on TV?
How’s the streaming process like back then , back when switching through channels on TV was one of the few ways to watch anime?
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Mostly it was a proprietary vhs format that was shipped to the TV station to air. USB sticks and PC video formats we’re not even a thing back in the day of Battle of the Planets and Robotech over the air.
All non-live TV currently works pretty much the exact same way, and it’s been this way for a while
You get either 1) the data sent via high speed fiber over the internet . 2) physical hard drives. 3) some lesser developed countries or poorer stations just use ftp, seriously.
In the past you would be sent physical media containing the content of it was from overseas or if it needed to be physical, like film reels. T there have been different formats and such, but you just stick it in the mail and mail it. For films, this used to be a very large expense, reels are expensive.
Live TV is done via satellite or fiber, generally in very high bitrates.
In the days before streaming, it would be on video tapes or film. That’s actually how some episodes of old TV shows have been preserved – sometimes the master tapes were wiped (often to save money by reusing tapes) or the film lost, but copies shipped to other countries have later turned up and the “lost” episodes have been recovered.
Format for delivery back before digital media was on tape. The standard was 3/4”, then Beta. After that it was digital Beta.
Read the section on broadcast video formats here
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape
Anime was no different than any other type of TV show. Even today “streaming” is not typically used to distribute pre-recorded content to broadcasters; instead, they direct transfer video files.
Today, videos are digital, and sending a file is certainly possible. In the late 70’s through the 90’s that they’d ship the shows on videotape. There were special video tape formats used in broadcast TV, so they weren’t like the VHS tapes you got from the video store in the 1980’s. The broadcaster would order a copy in a format that they had equipment for, such as “Type B”, “Type C”, or “BVU”… and later “Betacam” (you could buy Betacam players for home) and “MII”.
Sony introduced a digital format in 1986 (D-1), but the equipment was really expensive. In 1988 they’d introduced a follow-on “D-2” which was notably cheaper. It wouldn’t be until the early 1990s that the digital video formats for broadcast would really start to catch on. By that time, there was lots of competition for digital video cassette formats.
By the end of the 1990s, pretty much everyone had switched to some sort of digital video cassette.
By the middle 2000’s, it was starting to become practical to put digital video on hard disks, and there were industry standards for encoding digital video into files. As Internet speeds increased and storage prices dropped, it became practical to distribute the content through file transfer.
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