I can tell that you were born after 9/11 based on this comment. That’s not how anything works. Old shit was filmed on film, it is made HD by scanning the film. Old shit doesn’t have smaller file sizes.
Do you ever wonder why you can buy 1960s movies on bluray in 1080p? It’s because old films were still HD, they were stored on analog on film reels. Old shit is made digital recently by scanning the film reels.
You’re thinking of film cameras used for motion pictures. While some shows were shot on 35mm or 16mm film, you’re forgetting that a ton of television particularly in the 70s, 80s, and 90s was shot with 525-line analog NTSC TV cameras. This was especially true for lower budget productions like most PBS content. Nobody’s bringing out the 35mm camera for an all-night live fundraising telethon, that’s way too expensive.
This stuff was stored using reel to reel video tape recorders on 2" Quadruplex film or later on U-matic or Betacam tapes (if your station was lucky enough to get one. You might have just made do with 2" Quad til the station manager eventually bought a consumer VHS recorder some time in the 80s.)
Not all TV was shot on film, especially live TV which in the early days was often not even stored at all and a lot of what was shot on film was on 16mm which can be digitized at lower definition with out loss.
But most important is that the lack of concern for preservation is not new. Most of the legacy media companies already lost considerable parts of their history well before digitization was even on the cards and were typically lazy about digitizing anything that wasn’t immediately monetizeable once it was.
Amazon published an article about how they made a cloud backup of BBC archives, UK tv channel. The article says that 100 years of BBC content amounted to 25 petabytes of storage (~25000 TB). I would think that PBS archives would need a similar amount of storage.
I can tell that you were born after 9/11 based on this comment. That’s not how anything works. Old shit was filmed on film, it is made HD by scanning the film. Old shit doesn’t have smaller file sizes.
Do you ever wonder why you can buy 1960s movies on bluray in 1080p? It’s because old films were still HD, they were stored on analog on film reels. Old shit is made digital recently by scanning the film reels.
You’re thinking of film cameras used for motion pictures. While some shows were shot on 35mm or 16mm film, you’re forgetting that a ton of television particularly in the 70s, 80s, and 90s was shot with 525-line analog NTSC TV cameras. This was especially true for lower budget productions like most PBS content. Nobody’s bringing out the 35mm camera for an all-night live fundraising telethon, that’s way too expensive.
This stuff was stored using reel to reel video tape recorders on 2" Quadruplex film or later on U-matic or Betacam tapes (if your station was lucky enough to get one. You might have just made do with 2" Quad til the station manager eventually bought a consumer VHS recorder some time in the 80s.)
Not all TV was shot on film, especially live TV which in the early days was often not even stored at all and a lot of what was shot on film was on 16mm which can be digitized at lower definition with out loss. But most important is that the lack of concern for preservation is not new. Most of the legacy media companies already lost considerable parts of their history well before digitization was even on the cards and were typically lazy about digitizing anything that wasn’t immediately monetizeable once it was.
Could be low quality original archives that were then digitized at like 480p, depending on when they made the archive.
Amazon published an article about how they made a cloud backup of BBC archives, UK tv channel. The article says that 100 years of BBC content amounted to 25 petabytes of storage (~25000 TB). I would think that PBS archives would need a similar amount of storage.
https://archive.is/suZz6
the bbc archive is across multiple channels that almost exclusively produce original programming
from what i understand, 9 pbs is a local news channel that mostly airs syndicated shows