zlacker

>>thunde+(OP)
I'm surprised there aren't more full tapings of 90's television available, as in entire blocks of broadcasting with all the commercials intact. That was how most recording would have happened, and with the start of TV Land the networks should have been able to predict there'd be a market for it in 30 years.

>>boombo+CI
Storage was a problem back then.

>>guestb+MK
Not really. Hoarders were already mass recording TV from home, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes

Recording ~5 hours of television a night would have been a trivial cost for a network like NBC. Particularly compared to the licensing fees those hours would have had.

>>boombo+uR
Presumably it's not just the cost of storage media, but storage of the media too. Climate-controlled warehouses leased in perpetuity, archivists, security, and so on. To be clear, I don't think this is why so much of TV and movies (not to mention radio) is lost, I think that's just lack of foresight or different priorities. My point is, I don't think just buying a few thousand off-the-shelf VHS blanks would have solved the problem.