As Anders wrote about the ontology of television as early as 1956, the nonrecurring does not exist on television (Anders 1956, see also Chapter 13 in this volume). But if the nonrecurring does not exist, then how does the recurring emerge and from what? How does the repeated exist, and how is it called into being? One of television's answers to this question is the instant or slow-motion replay.

Even though I will employ these terms as synonyms (unless otherwise marked), it is important to note that they are different. For Anders, the term ‘instant replay’ emphasizes the instantaneity of the repetition and hence the complementarity between the recurrent and the unrepeatable, which is the instantaneous moment. It also implies playback, which requires a record or inscription and therefore a technical medium. The term ‘slow-motion replay’, on the other hand, emphasizes deceleration and magnification (the German term for slow motion, Zeitlupe, literallymeans ‘temporal looking glass’). The metaphor of the magnifier points not to recording or inscription media, but rather to visibility and enhanced evidence of the event, which implies that something more precise becomes evident or that something latent becomes manifest through the temporal delay.

This difference will only be addressed in the second and third part of this chapter. The first part will briefly describe the technical and economic conditions for the development of the instant replay and one or another of the more or less spectacular early and later uses of this technique.