Wiping, also known as junking is a colloquial term for action taken by radio and television production and broadcasting companies, in which old audiotapes, videotapes, and telerecordings (kinescopes), are erased, reused, or destroyed. Although the practice was once very common, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, wiping is now practiced much less frequently. Older video and audio formats took up much more storage space than modern digital video or audio files, making their retention more costly, thus increasing the incentive of discarding existing broadcast material to recover storage space for newer programmes.The advent of domestic audiovisual playback technology (e.g. videocassette and DVD) has made wiping less beneficial, with broadcasters and production houses realizing both the economic and cultural value of keeping archived material for both rebroadcast and potential profits through release on home video.