THERE was an air of experimentation in the odd 15-minute television show starring Jonathan Winters that NBC ran weekly in the 1950’s. Broadcast live, like nearly all television at the time, the program was largely unscripted, reliant on its star’s dependably unpredictable comic imagination. Mr. Winters would amble out in front of the camera, and a stagehand would toss him an everyday object — say, a pen and pencil set — as the sole prop for a wholly improvised comedy routine.

Thus the audience was prepared for the unexpected and the occasional misfire when, 50 years ago this month, it was told the network would be conducting a test of a new technology. The musical interlude in that week’s show, a two-and-a-half minute song by the ever-bubbly Dorothy Collins (then beloved as one of the stars of “Your Hit Parade”), had been performed the day before the broadcast, captured through an experimental process called videotape recording, and inserted into the otherwise live telecast. The video era had begun.

At the time, the networks thought of videotape mainly as a solution to a shipping problem, more a means of transportation than a radical new mode of communication. Their product, live television, was manufactured in New York, and their system of transport, the airwaves, could not carry it all the way across the country. The idea was that programs packaged on spools of videotape could be flown to the West Coast and rebroadcast the following day. This, in 1956, represented mass communication of unfathomable speed and reach.

Jonathan Winters saw something more in that R.C.A. tape machine the size of a Frigidaire sitting in his studio. Within weeks of that broadcast of Dorothy Collins’s recorded tune, he concocted a routine using videotape to appear as two characters, bantering back and forth, seemingly in the studio at the same time. You could say he invented the video stunt, planting the creative seed for the wild overgrowth of gag clips that last week earned YouTube a sale price of $1.65 billion.