 Although DuMont 's programming pre @-@ dated videotape , many DuMont offerings were recorded on kinescopes . These kinescopes were said to be stored in a warehouse until the 1970s . Actress Edie Adams , the wife of comedian Ernie Kovacs ( both regular performers on early television ) testified in 1996 before a panel of the Library of Congress on the preservation of television and video . Adams claimed that so little value was given to these films that the stored kinescopes were loaded into three trucks and dumped into Upper New York Bay . Nevertheless , a number of DuMont programs survive at The Paley Center for Media in New York City , the UCLA Film and Television Archive in Los Angeles , in the Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia , and the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago . 
