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There was a Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago with a large archive of video tape of broadcast TV.[1] For decades, anyone could go there and ask to watch anything in the archive. But they closed over a year ago. They're looking for a new location, but that's been going on for a while now.
I can’t speak to the entire archive you mention, but the Internet Archive accepted and is processing the Marion Stokes collection.
https://x.com/internetarchive/status/1393212448325308416 | https://archive.today/F0QDo
https://x.com/internetarchive/status/1392996252866932736 | https://archive.today/LFmyQ
Is there anywhere we can get a current status of this effort? At first glance there doesn't seem to be anywhere close to the full archive (there are only 182 items in that collection).
There's also the Paley Center for Media[1], formerly the Museum of Television & Radio, in New York. They are unfortunately not completionist, but they do have good taste in what they do archive.
As one might expect, these tapes eventually began to take up space — a lot of it. By investing in Apple stock, Stokes saved enough money to buy as many as nine additional apartments, which she used as storage units to hold all of her tapes.
Ive convinced myself now that this woman was a time traveler and you cannot sway me.
archiving for the future... perfect bet on a single stock... hmmm
I came here to say this.
When I lived in a 1930s apartment building, there were door frames throughout the floor. I could have expanded my 2b2ba to the entire floor by putting doors on either side of the central elevators.
If she lived in a similar building, all she'd have had to do was move her door to the end of the hall, and all of the apartments around her would have become additional rooms.
This doesn't really address the question of why she used expensive residential locations for storage instead of cheaper alternatives.
Apartments are more useful assets to own than storage units.
Not sure where you're from, but in most of the US "apartments" are not assets, but liabilities: tenants don't own them, but rent them. We generally call them "condos" when owned.
And commensurately more expensive
Purchasing real state assets that appreciate in value significantly over time is better than paying for rent expense every month if you don't indent those tapes to go anywhere else
Rent only really makes sense if you can't afford to buy, generally
I don't know what is more incredible, the fact that she is doing this or the fact that she's funding this project with AAPL.
Archiving television programs was not Stokes’ only fascination. In fact, the tech-savvy hoarder also took an early interest in Apple computers — and amassed 192 Macintosh computers before she died.
I'd really like to know more about why she collected 192 Macs. What did she think/know?
Literally became rich from stock, like investing in NVIDIA today
Or, if you started investing in NVIDIA years ago. They just had a 10-1 stock split.
As a kid, I'd videotape movies off broadcast TV onto VHS tapes. Only as an adult did I realize that the longer-term value of those recordings wasn't in the movies, but more in the ads I didn't always pause out, and -- most of all -- in the brief teasers of local news in the commercial breaks, which are probably lost to time.
I’ve noticed this phenomena all over. Same with our old home movies: they usually are of something like a high school graduation ceremony, but the really good parts are the times when the camera catches people talking normally, discussing plans for dinner that night or whatever.
I’ve inherited a bunch of VHS tapes from around 2003-2008, mostly recordings of live broadcast football matches, including the commercial breaks. Who would I contact to work out if there’s any archival value to them? Part of me thinks they’re just not old enough and surely the stations had their own archives by that point, but part of me thinks they probably didn’t keep material in context with the ad breaks and possibly someone might find that interesting.
Take a peak on Reddit's /r/datahoarders or /r/datacurator. There's also https://wiki.archiveteam.org/ who may point you in a direction.
Sometimes stations do keep a record of their old broadcasts. But that depends on their size, organizational structure, funding, etc. some stuff is just lost to time simply because someone felt it was cheaper to just reuse tapes.
As for value, that's hard to determine. Depends on what was taped, when, by whom and in what kind of context. That's where curation comes in to play.
> archival value
If you want copies of old TV shows that had bad DVD/BD copies, and can get through the VCR snow, then maybe... uploading that stuff anywhere would probably still incur the wrath of DMCA takedowns though, so personal use only.
Back in the early 00s, I had a DVR and for the life of me, I couldn't get a clean copy of some shows. Stations would always throw junk on the screen, and some repeats of repeats would also have them (and sometimes weird cropping angles to boot)
Maybe you know this, but incredibly and amusingly (to me at least) it's sometimes the answer to post a comment here like yours, and someone appears saying [X] archival group will be happy to take them, email blah to arrange shipping.
Of course, absence of that doesn't mean there's no value to anyone.
info at archive dot org
71k tapes, 400k hours. 480p H.264 (already better quality than VHS) can be encoded at around 300MB/h, so the whole collection would take approximately 120TB, or less than 10 LTO-9 tapes. It's always amazing to see the massive increase in storage density over time, although reliability is a different story; nonetheless, tape is an established good choice for long-term archival.
I just wish the LTO-9 drives came down in price, and into the reach of consumers and small startups.
Does the IA have an archive collection where all that data sits? I search IA but multiple collections get shown with varying content and sizes
A h264 encoded file of a vhs tape is not better than vhs
> (already better quality than VHS)
This is misleading statement. If the recording format is better than the source format, it does not mean that the recording of the source will be better than the source. So I'm not really sure why this was added to all of the stats you've mentioned. Why not say that the LTO-9 tapes are better quality than VHS?
You then go on to say that "can" be encoded at around 300MB/h, yet that is also very misleading. Nobody encoding VHS tape sources at 480p will be using that kind of bit rate. You have to be using some very strange settings to even be able to convince an encoder to allow that value, and even then the encoder is so efficient I doubt it would ever use that bandwidth.
Somewhat related, but Vanderbilt University has a TV news archive as well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanderbilt_Television_News_Arc...
A media professor of mine had a huge collection of political commercials (and other politically-oriented media) in pre-VHS video. He passed away quite young and I assume that material was lost to the sands of time at some point. A lot of pre-digital media sort of depended on someone making a really serious effort to preserve it in some manner.
I wonder what stations were recorded. It'd be pretty cool to go back and relive the Saturday morning cartoons of childhood, complete with commercials. Or see old news broadcasts that you remember watching during dinner.
AFAIK all the Marion Stokes tapes were digitized at the Internet Archive after her passing:
Have a look at https://www.myretrotvs.com/
There's a ton of that type of content on YouTube. I occasionally put on old commercials for background noise
This is pretty impressive and all, and I'm glad this was actually archived and didn't just end up in a landfill, but at the risk of being that weird nerd... Why did she get one TV per recorder? I know very early models didn't have a tuner but it sounds she got them over time, so just hook them all up to one or two TVs, tune them to the appropriate channel and start recording!?
I guess she also wanted to be able to conveniently see what all the VCRs were recording, at any time? Ok, several TV sets were expensive, but compared to the cost of all the tapes (not to mention the apartments she bought to store the tapes) I guess it was just a rounding error...
Most VCRs were preset to output to UHF channel 36 (at least that's the UK numbering, it may be slightly different in the US), and so while recording different channels would be fine with multiple VCRs without a TV, watching the output from multiple VCRs wouldn't have been as easy. Maybe she wanted to be easily able to check what a particular VCR was recording without having to swap wires at the back of the TV. You could probably have made a giant coax switch box too, but it's unlikely they'd have been available commercially with more than just an A/B switch.
There also used to be tuning screw accessible via a very small hole on most models in the UK, and you could re-tune it to output on a different channel that way, but sometimes you had to open up the VCR to get to that. Or maybe she just didn't know that was even possible. In any case, there would only have been so many spare channels for her to use before she started interfering with the broadcasts she was trying to capture.
Maybe she just liked having a bank of screens that all had a different channel. I know my younger self would have thought that was pretty cool!
By the 90s she was probably buying tv/vcr combo sets. Saves on setup, space, gives her monitoring and they weren't that much more expensive
What an amazing story of an amazing woman.
Is there any laws or rights to protect her legacy? I can already feel lawyers salivating at it.
I’m not sure if she has any type of cataloguing in place, but she almost certainly has some programs that never were published outside of broadcast and who I’ve had a hard time talking to anyone about licensing.
If anyone has experience with any of this, please reach out, I’d be interest in learning more.
The article says she wanted to record the news as an important record of events. It's a contrast to these days, when news broadcasters are seen as sensationalists and at times politically motivated (by me anyway).
I find it intriguing that she went all in on AAPL stock, but was also an avowed communist in life. I'd have to wonder how she managed to reconcile her political views with the fierce capitalist landscape of the stock market, and ultimately benefiting from her good fortune?
Regardless, her contributions to archiving TV of the era is nothing short of impressive.
wonder what cool insights we can see now that AI can process this data; a history of how consent is manufactured by local media?
Now that people are training AI models for video this might actually be worth something as training data.
Culture isn't culture anymore, it's content to put ads around. People aren't artists, they are content creators. And now the final form, content is only useful past its ad serving ability if it can be used to train models.
Or, it may be useful for a massive archive of human history even.