Generally speaking, videotape eliminates the cost of developing and printing, making it much cheaper than film for shooting a show. A smaller production budget allows producers to create more television shows servicing niche markets. This allows a wider variety of programming choices.
Because it did not require development in a lab, video allowed for more immediacy in television reporting. News crews could videotape a segment on location and transmit the footage back to the studio, which could edit the segment right away. By the 1960s, producers were using videotape to record a variety of shows, from soap operas and game shows to situation comedies.
Many hour-long dramas continue to shoot on film, despite the cost-effectiveness of videotape. Film captures a wider range of contrast and allows more subtle lighting–values which benefit dramatic television more than any other genre. TV shows like "House" and "Criminal Minds" currently use 35-mm film, although they do all their editing digitally.
The low production costs associated with videotape make reality television shows such as "The Real World" and "Survivor" economically feasible. Because of their unpredictable nature, these shows shoot hundreds of hours more than a typical scripted show of the same length. Producers discard most of this footage during the editing process. Cameras that record video are also lighter and cheaper than those that record film. Also, video cameras can blend more easily into the environment to allow for more naturalistic observations.
Most consumer video cameras no longer record to videotape. Rather, they record digital video directly to an internal hard drive or a portable storage device such as a flash memory drive. This allows manufacturers to make video cameras even smaller than they were just a few years ago while producing clearer images and sounds than analog cameras could record. Despite this, most television productions still use digital tape, because it provides a permanent archive for the raw footage.