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Comment by LarryMullins | Hacker News Reader

> For decades before the invention of the VCR, any TV show that aired on any given Tuesday night might never be available again,While I was doing research for The Encyclopedia of New York, I spoke with a curator at the Paley Center in New York about how to find out what aired on NBC in its earliest years as a TV broadcasting company and learned there was no way to watch any of it. There were no tapes. The only record is a filing cabinet, which is part of the Paley collection, full of the carefully typed index cards where secretaries kept track of everything that aired on the network. and certainly never in a way that viewers could control.

Yeah okay... but we are in a post-VCR world. Are any of these [modern, but removed from streaming] shows not preserved and available through online filesharing? I think they probably all are.

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I'd expect that there's a fair amount of local-release content that might not have surviving recordings. Individual episodes of things like local newscasts, public affairs shows, those weird weekend "lifestyle" shows where all the guests are local advertisers basically paying for a 10-minute ad spot. There might be a representative episode floating around, but does anyone necessarily have the December 16, 2007 episode of the Channel 83 Action News at Noon? If they do, is it publically accessible, or sitting in some dusty records room at Channel 83, on decaying tape?

You're probably right about that. But HBO shows? Those are surely all archived by the file sharers the article pretends don't exist.

You have to be pretty determined and somewhat tech-savvy to find them. For most people, if it doesn't show up in the HBO/Netflix/Amazon/iTunes list, it doesn't exist. There are a lot of shows that were on Netflix years ago that I'd like to see again, but they are gone. However I'm not motivated enough to go figure out how to download them from some pirate site.

In my country there is a government funded institute that records everything that is on TV. It is open for historians.

Sadly in the 1960s and 70s tapes were very expensive but from the 80s on if it aired you can find it.

I'm not sure if you're mis-reading the quote, or don't have the implied context for the quote, which is that television broadcast did not originally pass through any persistence layer. It went from the camera to the television, never to be seen again.

The article isn't talking about pre-VCR shows, which indeed were ephemeral. The article is hand-wringing about modern shows getting dropped from streaming services in 2022. These shows are almost certainly preserved online through file sharing.

The article ignores filesharing and tries to suggest that the ''disappearance'' of modern shows is somehow worse than the disappearance of pre-VCR shows: "TV Has Always Disappeared. This [disappearance of shows in 2022] Feels Different"

The real reason it's different is because these modern shows haven't actually disappeared, unlike those pre-VCR shows.

Oh, sorry, I misunderstood "these shows" to mean the shows referenced by the quote, rather than by the article.

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