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Do television stations save their broadcast days on tapes or not?

Mauro1515

Mauro1515

I really know that in the early days when SIGN-OFF is where the TV stations conclude their broadcast days at Midnight, but I wanted to
know if they saved those recorded days, but I don't think so the would, because after the previous day stopped the broadcast day they throw in the trash their yesterday broadcast days on tape, and record some new ones, and throw in the trash when they sign on and record. then sign off and then after that....Sort of..
 
Mauro1515 said:
I really know that in the early days when SIGN-OFF is where the TV stations conclude their broadcast days at Midnight, but I wanted to
know if they saved those recorded days, but I don't think so the would, because after the previous day stopped the broadcast day they throw in the trash their yesterday broadcast days on tape, and record some new ones, and throw in the trash when they sign on and record. then sign off and then after that....Sort of..
Click to expand...

While there will be many different way of keeping an electronic log, back in the days of tape stations would generally only keep video tape of local originations, not the full broadcast day. And they would keep them only as long as legal counsel instructed them to. After that, the tape was re-used many times until it had too much wear to be used any more. Video tape was very, very expensive and was not thrown out until excessive usage made it unreliable.

Video tape is very bulky, so stations were also limited by the amount of storage space they had. However, film and later, video tape, of new event was often keep as long as there was space in case it was needed for a new story.

Once hard disk digital recording became cheap and easy, stations would keep more material for a longer time. But it has only been in very recent years that stations could afford servers with hundreds of terabytes of storage.
 
At a TV station I worked master control at, the company that owned the station kept an archive of a broadcast day of all the stations they owned for 3 days on their own Intranet (private internet) server. Was in RealPlayer format so the video quality was as such. It helped with shows that aired live on the east coast, to determine break times before the show aired taped for the west coast (to feed into the automation system). This was back in the early 2000s, so it is possible.
 
We ran a VHS tape of the whole proogrsmming dat at WLFI-TV, Lafayette IN but I don't know how long we kept it. Maybe just a week.

In Dayton, Ohio. the former home of WKEF-22 has been abandoned for some time, Someone was let in and video'ed the premesis, and there were a lot of 3/4 tapes scattered about. There's a move to get access to them for possible digitization
 
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