Oh come on... I read these comments and was thinking I'd see something ridiculously large--maybe even taking up a third of the video--not something that's only like a tenth the vertical space. Yes: it would be better to not have it, but a lot of TV stations had watermarks on TV shows at the time! This isn't that large, I can see through it, and the audio is (of course) fine.

The reason no one is mirroring these things isn't because of the watermarks: it is because all of this content was already just ephemera that most people consider trash in the first place. Hell: I care a lot about this stuff... but do I want to personally spend the money to carry it around forever? This is a lot of content that I will never personally watch much of. But is that because of the URL watermark? No.

(edit: Oh god... I started watching some of this stuff and realized it isn't just commercials but local Chicago news reporting on important historical topics and now I am in fact frantically archiving parts of the channel, though I am definitely doing so selectively; but like, they clearly themselves were uploading somewhat selectively, so the hit rate is higher than I had initially hoped even though it is still certainly a small fraction of the channel.)