History of Music Videos - Scopitones

Having done some research into the history of music videos, I found some interesting information into how music videos were shown in earlier years. The method I looked into was Scopitones.

Scopitone films are seen as the 1960 ancestors of the music videos of today. These were distributed on colour 16mm film and were made to be shown on a Scopitone film jukebox. The first scopitones were made in France in the 1960s and had spread throughout the Europe and America by 1964. However by the end of the 1960s, Scopitones ceased to exist.

With the introduction of the Scopitone came several competitors, these are explored below:


The Cinebox was an Italian film jukebox that debuted in 1959. It entered the market in Europe almost at the exact same time as the Scopitone. It entered the U.S. market in the spring of 1963, which was well before Scopitone, but was never as popular there as Scopitone. In 1965, the Cinebox was renamed Colorama in the US and in 1966, it was completely redesigned as the ultra-stylish Cinejukebox.




Another competitor to the Scopitone was the Color-Sonics. This debuted in mid-1966, with films made by Official Films at Paramount Studios in Hollywood. The jukebox used 8mm magnetic-sound film cartridges. Color-Sonics also made 16mm prints of at least some of its films so that they could be shown on a Scopitone jukebox. The 16mm prints have often faded miserably over the years.