With so many hours of TV stored in news vaults why are stations like ABC, NBC, and CBS holding all this content and not selling it to the public? ABC and NBC license footage to organizations. These organizations have to pay some type of fee or royalty to use the footage. However, if all this footage was released to the public and sold on iTunes couldn’t these companies be making lots of money? Economics would tell us that there is some reason why these companies are not doing this or else they would already be doing it. C-SPAN recently put its archived footage since 1987 online for free. C-SPAN has over 116,000 hours of footage and shows like The John Stewart Show and the Colbert Report use it for research (mainly to do jokes). The cost to C-SPAN to digitize everything was around $1 million per year. C-SPAN does recover part of the money by selling the same content on DVD’s for around Vanderbilt University has a Television News Archive that goes back to 1968 and allows people to make a video request loan for footage at a cost of $12 per every half hour of TV. Also, a lot of video is already free online. For instance, YouTube has a lot of older content that really covers important or breaking news.
In time I believe the cost to digitize older footage will decrease and with the growing space that hard drives allow for I think one day we could see news footage for sale to the public. It would be interesting to one day have a TIVO device and just search for anything ever on TV like the 1996 World Series or a Presidential Election.
In time I believe the cost to digitize older footage will decrease and with the growing space that hard drives allow for I think one day we could see news footage for sale to the public. It would be interesting to one day have a TIVO device and just search for anything ever on TV like the 1996 World Series or a Presidential Election.
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