In the first decade of the 1900s, a cinema program consisted of an equal amount of non-fiction and fiction films. However, around 1910 short non-fiction films started to be put together into longer newsreels. Thus, at the time the newsreel by and large became the only documentary footage in the cinema programs.

Svenska Bio started to produce their weekly newsreel in 1914. Companies like Pathé and Gaumont had already produced newsreel for a number of years. Later on Svenska Bio newsreel developed into the SF-Newsreel, which thereafter, for almost 60 years, was to filmically depict the development of Sweden.