That's true! But, you know, in '68 you didn't have options, if you didn't happen to catch it during a broadcast you didn't get to see it. (Even when I was starting to be old enough to care about this stuff in the 90s, most people didn't have options; VCRs were still a luxury good and most TV shows didn't get VHS releases.)
And even later the networks never really acknowledged taping off the air - if there wasn't an official VHS/DVD release that they were currently selling, they didn't think of it as being available, so it didn't factor into their business plans, and they never did VHS releases of the majority of TV. (I've been seeing a few thinkpieces lately that talk about this with the music industry actually from a slightly different angle - until streaming services, the only way studios had a way to track what music was being listened to was via radio play and sales of recordings, and now they're suddenly being like, wait, people constantly listen to old music that isn't on the radio and hasn't had a recent CD release? When did listening habits change? And of course people have always done that, but the studios didn't have a way to track when you listened to your old LPs, so they literally did not realize it was a huge part of the market until now, and they actually think it's a generational shift in what kind of music people like. No video streaming service has ever actually offered the kind of back catalog access that the music sites do as a matter of course, even early on, so they have not had that realization yet.)
I guess for me I had this disillusion early on? In the early days of streaming Netflix there was a huge amount of press about how now you could get any show you wanted whenever you wanted on demand! And then I went and looked for the shows I wanted to watch that I had never been able to legally get other ways, and none of them were there. No Golden Girls, no Hogan's Heroes, no Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, no old episodes of Jeopardy from the 80s. Most of them would probably have been super cheap to get the rights to at the time, too. (Many of them were on Youtube.) Even early on they'd made the really obvious calculation that putting up an extensive back catalog was a losing proposition. We've just now reached the point that streaming originals count as back catalog for the first time.
Yeah, it absolutely does suck that stuff is coming down that doesn't have any official DVD release yet, but, y'know, I was also around for the early days of anime fandom in the US, where nothing had an official DVD release, and if you're tied in enough to the fandom to melt down in Discord about it, you probably do already know someone who knows someone.
I guess this connects back to the strong feelings I get about a fight I've also had repeatedly lately about people saying that fanwriters shouldn't have the right to take down their fanfic, ever, because putting it on AO3 was an agreement to keep it available to the entire fandom forever and it's ethically unsupportable to take it down. Sometimes. Things aren't available anymore. And that's ok.
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And even later the networks never really acknowledged taping off the air - if there wasn't an official VHS/DVD release that they were currently selling, they didn't think of it as being available, so it didn't factor into their business plans, and they never did VHS releases of the majority of TV. (I've been seeing a few thinkpieces lately that talk about this with the music industry actually from a slightly different angle - until streaming services, the only way studios had a way to track what music was being listened to was via radio play and sales of recordings, and now they're suddenly being like, wait, people constantly listen to old music that isn't on the radio and hasn't had a recent CD release? When did listening habits change? And of course people have always done that, but the studios didn't have a way to track when you listened to your old LPs, so they literally did not realize it was a huge part of the market until now, and they actually think it's a generational shift in what kind of music people like. No video streaming service has ever actually offered the kind of back catalog access that the music sites do as a matter of course, even early on, so they have not had that realization yet.)
I guess for me I had this disillusion early on? In the early days of streaming Netflix there was a huge amount of press about how now you could get any show you wanted whenever you wanted on demand! And then I went and looked for the shows I wanted to watch that I had never been able to legally get other ways, and none of them were there. No Golden Girls, no Hogan's Heroes, no Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, no old episodes of Jeopardy from the 80s. Most of them would probably have been super cheap to get the rights to at the time, too. (Many of them were on Youtube.) Even early on they'd made the really obvious calculation that putting up an extensive back catalog was a losing proposition. We've just now reached the point that streaming originals count as back catalog for the first time.
Yeah, it absolutely does suck that stuff is coming down that doesn't have any official DVD release yet, but, y'know, I was also around for the early days of anime fandom in the US, where nothing had an official DVD release, and if you're tied in enough to the fandom to melt down in Discord about it, you probably do already know someone who knows someone.
I guess this connects back to the strong feelings I get about a fight I've also had repeatedly lately about people saying that fanwriters shouldn't have the right to take down their fanfic, ever, because putting it on AO3 was an agreement to keep it available to the entire fandom forever and it's ethically unsupportable to take it down. Sometimes. Things aren't available anymore. And that's ok.