A seminal moment for community video is popularly taken to be George Stoney's intervention on behalf of North American Indians using one of the first portable black and white Sony Portapacks in the late 1960s. The plight of a particularly remote village was recorded on video tape and screened to the Canadian Government. Out of sight no longer meant out of mind.

In the UK we can go back further still to the aspirations of the workers' film movement of the 1920s and 30s - particularly evident in Scotland where much of the documentation is archived at Stirling University. Emulating the Soviet propaganda filmmakers these UK cinematographers were mostly motivated out of sympathy or membership of the workers' movements. Whether focused on poor housing or unemployment the filmmakers were often spurred by attraction to the communist party or the cooperative movement who had access to Soviet and European workers' films. The workers' filmmakers systematically recorded and sometimes reconstructed significant moments and events in the struggle, saving movement history from invisibility by recording it on film.

But for the video community 1969 presented a significant moment because in the form of the Portapak new TV technology broke away from servicing exclusively the expensive commercial and national broadcasting organisations whose social and economic purpose was not shared by community activists.

By 1970 artists in Europe and North America had discovered the Portapak - I used one of the first in the UK to record an exhibition in Coventry. The college only had one tape - so it was reused almost immediately!! A few months later, on a visit to Nova Scotia School of Art and Design in Canada – art performances were being documented and produced on these relatively simple camera and recorder systems.

The Portapak soon became the main driver of community video work in Europe drawing on variations of Stoney's witnessing and reportage approach. In the UK by the late 1970s some of the developments in community based production spawned the film and video workshop sector soon institutionalised by the new Channel 4. The workshops were a politically correct sample of community based companies and cooperatives, giving their producers a break from the restricted audiences served by video cassette distribution. Arguably this liberation was double edged - freeing the producers not just from the financial shortcomings of community scale but from its social environment - in return achieving a more abstract national audience reached by large scale broadcasting. By the end of the 1980s a self-selecting aspirant band of ex-workshops was migrating towards production company status, while the remainder more or less highly motivated (depending on your outlook) dropped back, some to their roots (others to compost).

Many of the film and video workshops did briefly integrate a community practice with their Channel 4 endeavours: and probably no better example of cooperation was represented in the Miners Campaign Tapes of 1984/5 which (with no little irony) combined the local with the national and achieved a Royal Television Society award.

For small film or video groups in the late 1970s a central issue had been access to distribution. For Red Star in Edinburgh this was partly resolved by its volunteer producers setting up a cinema to screen their Super 8 films alongside hired-in 16mm films on labour movement topics. This spawned film making for political and agitational purposes in circumstances of state hostility towards the left in the late '70s and early '80s, a similar picture to that engaged by the earlier workers' filmmakers.

With the support of the GLC (Greater London Council) and individual trades unions in the mid-1980s - and their resource and unemployed workers' centres - small-scale video making for the labour movement and its causes did receive support in opposition to the self-centred Thatcher era. But distribution remained a major problem - especially when there was no large organisation to serve as the video's sponsor (and by implication when there was sponsorship the exercise underpinned their objectives for independence).

In spite of the distribution difficulties offered by video cassette many community video producers in the UK have taken little interest in broadcasting. Some community video workers' argue that the process of involving the community in 'making' is their primary role and that quality issues arising with access to a wider less partial more general (and uninvolved) audience can be contrary to the pursuit of the primary confidence-building role.

Nonetheless there are those producers working outside the mainstream television industry who do believe that dissemination provides an important framework which helps inform the quality and content of programme production - broadcasting most obviously, but web-casting too. That is, that the tail of distribution does indeed wag the dog of production, or to bastardise Marx - there is a well founded belief that control of the means of distribution will transform the nature, purpose and qualities of television production.

For my own practice, from Red Star, through trades union videos, Channel 4 productions and two TV RSLs - Edinburgh Television and Channel Six Dundee - the common feature is that the conditions of display - whether exhibition, publication or broadcasting does inform what you produce.

First published as a web addition to Airflash 75 Summer 2003. For further analysis see Books, TV Studies and Broadcasting Policy.