In the early days of television there was no such thing as videotape. Programmes either screened live or were photographed on black and white sixteen-millimetre film. When the news department wanted to use footage from a previous story, they simply cut the frames from one film and spliced them into another. Off cuts went into the rubbish. The screened material was kept, often on piles on desks, in the city from which it was transmitted.
As television developed, people wanted to refer back to previous programmes. There was no centralised system and it was during the late 1970s that a programme library was set up at Avalon Studios, then home of TV ONE, to store local programmes.
TVNZ purchased the National Film Unit (NFU) collection in 1990 and so, with the acquisition of rights to the NFU's productions, the collection suddenly dated back to 1938.
On 20 March 2002 the New Zealand Television Archive's state of the art purpose built facility was opened at Avalon Studios, Wellington. Material was housed on 20 kilometres of shelves in two vaults; rated by the Rochester Institute of Technology as capable of storing film and tape, without degradation, for over 500 and 100 years respectively. With temperature as low as 7 degrees Celsius and relative humidity of 25%, the building was designed with assistance from Hollywood Vaults president David Wexler.
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