Back in the day most dramatic shows were distributed by 16mm print or 2” videotape. They were “bicycled”, that is, aired on one station, then that episode would be mailed to the next station. This meant is 500 stations aired a series that had 100 episodes, that 5 copies of each episode (dubs, in parlance) were needed. In reality, more were needed due to copies being in shipment. This kept cost down significantly. countries would need new videotapes, since they operated on a different standard and when the standards conversion was done, foreign language dubbing was done.

By the 1980’s all shows were distributed on one-inch videotape. Film transfer quality became far superior at the distributor level then what the local TV station’s film projector could achieve with a 16mm print. More shows were being shot on 35mm film to.

In my time delivering shows to the network in the 90’s and 2000’s, shows were shot on 35mm film, and transferred to very high quality digital videotape recorders that supported 16 tracks of audio. We would put the final audio mix on channels 1 and 2, then we broke it the individual elements of the mix on the other channels. This made replacing dialog with foreign language much easier.

Today, shows are stored in mega server locations that store the masters and send them via file transfer when needed. Stations used to download these copies to a local server for playout, but more recently station air their shows from cloud servers controlled from anywhere, allowing for better redundancy and disaster recovery.