I keep saying, if this stuff is publically owned works made by the corporation for public broadcasting, put up some official torrents and let the public archive it for free. Mr. Rogers would surely approve of sharing for the common good.
None of it is solely funded by CPB. This is Nine PBS not PBS. 50TB is very low for broadcast footage so it’s likely a small handful of local shows, and a partial archive at that. For context, a 2000s consumer camcorder tape was 17GB per hour.
Woah that is some wild context. So wait does that mean it’d take 17GB to digitally store an hour’s worth of that footage…“faithfully”?
Not trying to paint you into some “gotcha!” corner or anything weird, ya just made me curious.
I also just find weird and tortured units of measure fun, so “magnetic tape, ya know, the 17GB/hr kind” really tickles me.
Just because they are called “public” it doesn’t mean they’re owned by the public. It’s a non profit created to produce media for public consumption, but they still have bills to pay, employees, etc.
If they have content for streaming or DVD sales or (probably more likely) licensing to other PBS stations, they need to get income from it to maximize their ability to continue to produce the free broadcasts they were created for.
And here’s why public archival is so important.
I would not be surprised if whatever person in charge of the archive, if there is/was one, has advocated for a 3-2-1 solution. But the hoops were too much to get through to have a fucking back up system beyond a relying on random storage company. That or it was someone who’s been in the job sense they converted the tapes to digital and has just been coasting along uploading stuff for the past 20 years.