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Originally Posted by Winsordawson
I am surprised they had to rely on YouTube for archival material. Just shows that even a major news channel in a major city has not digitalized their footage from the analog era.
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It's a money issue. They won't spend it.
In-house isn't usually possible due to lack of manpower and lack of legacy equipment.
Outsourced isn't possible due to their own divorced-from-reality concepts of what's involved to convert it (and payment thereof). I think too many in charge now are from the digital-only era, and have had their ideas of transfer costs warped by the fly-by-nights ops doing $10/tape quick-and-dirty half@ss VHS conversions.
We've had organizations contact us in the past, wanting to get their huge archive transferred for $5 per tape. Some were news stations. And not even VHS, but S-VHS, U-matic, Digital Betacam, BetacamSP, etc. They thought that saying "bulk order" would somehow magically make it less work or something. It was patently absurd. That's slave wages, about what you'd earn flipping burgers. Maybe less.
So most archive footage still rots away in its non-digital mediums. What is transferred generally is not catalogued very well, unlike the digital asset management systems in place. You'd read about this problem, from time to time, in Broadcast Engineering magazine.
That's the dirty truth of that industry.
I had an in to join a CBS station in a major metro some years ago (pre-recession), but chose not to. I didn't like what I saw.
Quite a few have decided that Youtube is "good enough" for the masses, so it'll have to be "good enough" for them. Low quality and all. It's sad and pathetic how much video has devolved in quality in the past decade.
