How did news footage get shared internationally in the 80s?

[ActonBell]

I’ve been watching The Newsreader (set in Australia in the 80s) on iplayer and there’s a bit where they are waiting for footage of the challenger disaster to get to them from the US. It made we wonder how that worked before the internet. Is a news agency like Reuters or AP sending the recorded footage internationally by satellite or cable or what? If so, wouldn’t that be fairly quick? They can’t be waiting for the physical film can they?!

Ironically finding a definitive answer to this on the internet is proving difficult!
All I’ve found out so far is that it was incredibly difficult to send a photograph electronically right up until the 1990s.

No idea about your question, but just wanted to say I thoroughly enjoyed The Newsreader. Going to see if there's a thread in TV about it.

It’s good isn’t it? I wasn’t sure at first but after the first 20 mins or so I was hooked.

I also have no idea but want to know... looking forward to someone who knows more than me!

Pigeon

Yes, from the synopsis it's not something I'd usually be interested in, but I put it on because I feel like I've gone through literally everything else. I was hooked within the first ten minutes and binge watched it over a couple of days.

Apparently it's showing on BBC2 and I feel like it's wasted on there Should be on BBC1 prime time. Looking forward to the next series.

Satellite I presume. I saw the footage of the Challenger on the day it happened. I think on Blue Peter?!

I can remember seeing news come in from Reuters on a sort of tape, maybe Telex? Telex machine operator was a job, it was used quite a lot in some industries.

We had satellite coms in 1986.

Challenger was on newsround. I remember watching it too. I'm sure there was something in the newsround charter that they were the first to break news if it happened when CBBC was on but this was changed after Challenger as the establishment wasn't happy that it hadn't been delivered by mainstream new.

But that was for newspapers, I think.
Google says satellite was used in the 60's, but I think just for special stuff like the moon landings.

TV networks booked slots on satellite links shared vision and sound via these. The first satellite capable of such linkage was Telstar in 1962. I guess the people in the series were waiting for their slot to come up so they could tape the material locally.. The slots were expensive, so any mess-ups at either end at slot time were a bad thing. If you Google Intelsat there's quite a lot of stuff.

No idea, but my friend and I went to the pictures two days after the king died in 1952 and we saw news footage of the Queen arriving back in England and being greeted by Churchill.

Challenger was on the news by teatime because I remember watching it on my black and white tv . We all watched the evening news in those days. The actual news programs were pretty identical to now except information used to come by phone . No rolling ticker tape . If something important happened we used to have our four tv channels interrupted by a news flash where your tv would show a newsreader reading the important world event . Whole families sat at 6pm for the news back then and after big events you could queue at the newsagent for your paper which again was read by everyone.

Satellite. Sending TV/film footage via satellite was commonplace well before the mid 80's. If you watch footage of World Cup football from the 70's you'll notice the commentary often sounds like it's over an old analogue telephone line and a bit out of sync with the pictures. This is because it was. They'd send the pictures via satellite link, but commentate over a telephone cable, so by the time it ended up several thousand miles away there was sometimes a bit of a desync.

How did they relay the moon landing in 1969 onto tv screens

Ah that's right, it was on Newsround and they broke the story. Have just looked on Youtube and the programme on the day of the crash has 'recorded earlier' footage of the crash.

Beamed directly back via Apollo 11

gdmissionsystems.com/space/apollo11

Thanks all. Satellite makes sense - I thought that would be it. I just couldn’t understand why they had to wait in that case but @woolwinder your explanation really clears things up. Thank you! It definitely looked like they were receiving the footage and taping it so that they could rebroadcast it and use it in their own programme.

Feeds were available more or less live for important events but often they'd take a feed and edit it to fit their slot.

In addition to satellite, there were also the newswires - these were like a continual tickertape of short, factual news items, telegraphed around to all the news outlets. The main one was the Assoxiated Press, but there were others. The outlets themselves acted like stringers and if they had a story, say Kennedy being shot, a local news reporter would verify the facts and put it 'on the wires', then other outlets would know something was going on and would send their reporters to the area to get the full story, which would be telegraphed/telephoned back for publication.
There are old black and white clips online where news is interrupted to talk about an important story, and the newsreader is handed a piece of paper which has come from the newswires and then the newsreader has to take the facts on the paper and read it out as a coherent story, no autocues!