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Kinescope ˈkɪnᵻskoʊp, shortened to kine ˈkɪniː, also known as telerecording in Britain, is a recording of a television programme on motion picture film, directly through a lens focused on the screen of a video monitor. The process was pioneered during the 1940s for the preservation, re-broadcasting and sale of television programmes before the introduction of quadruplex videotape, which from 1956 eventually superseded the use of kinescopes for all of these purposes. Kinescopes were the only practical way to preserve live television broadcasts prior to videotape. Typically, the term Kinescope can refer to the process itself, the equipment used for the procedure (a movie camera mounted in front of a video monitor, and synchronised to the monitor's scanning rate), or a film made using the process. The term originally referred to the cathode ray tube used in television receivers, as named by inventor Vladimir K. Zworykin in 1929. Hence, the recordings were known in full as kinescope films or kinescope recordings. RCA was granted a trademark for the term (for its cathode ray tube) in 1932; it voluntarily released the term to the public domain in 1950. Film recorders are similar, but record source material from a computer system. Whereas a kinescope records television to film, a telecine is used to play film back on television. The General Electric laboratories in Schenectady, New York experimented with making still and motion picture records of television images in 1931. There is anecdotal evidence that the BBC experimented with filming the output of the television monitor before its television service was suspended in 1939 due to the outbreak of World War II. A BBC executive, Cecil Madden, recalled filming a production of The Scarlet Pimpernel in this way, only for film director Alexander Korda to order the burning of the negative as he owned the film rights to the book, which he felt had been infringed. While there is no written record of any BBC Television production of The Scarlet Pimpernel during 1936–1939, the incident is dramatised in Jack Rosenthal's 1986 television play The Fools on the Hill.

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