Example 1:
Right during the pandemic, TFI (French TV) put up all past seasons of its show ‘Star Academy’. It was something I have been trying to get hold of but did not have any luck. As soon as it popped I thought I got it all. (2 years ago). Today I found out I was missing the first season (8 in total) and went to try to grab it. ALL seasons have now been removed. I am quite pissed at it!
Example 2:
A user upscaled Britney Spear music videos using AI. The results were mind blowing. I grabbed all the videos I could (official ones are 480p/720 p max limited). Less than 1 week later, the content was gone…forever.
Example 3: (Non YT)
Not YT. Koh Lanta (French equivalent of Survivor) is aired on french TV (TFI again). As soon as the season is over, they take it down. You are unable to rewatch/watch it if you missed the air/stream time. ALL past seasons are also not available and that spans to about 20+ years of contents and 30+seasons. Same applies to US Survivor but to a lesser extent. And you need to keep paying to ‘stream’ it.
Conclusion:
Always archive media you want to rewatch/collect. Streaming is not your friend. It is just another way of controlling content distribution, tying you up to the ‘subscription’ slavery model instead of owning your contents and worse, down the line downright CENSORING or MODIFYING contents to fit whatever garbage narrative is currently en vogue.
Stay focused brothers!
Way too much stuff is disappearing these days, my archive has over 200k videos that have been removed from YouTube
What prompts you to archive this stuff? I’m a YouTuber and while I do have my own archives, I don’t want to archive it for me, I want that data to be available for years, decades, perhaps centuries to come.
Like what if YT goes for some reason. What’s essentially my current, most important job is all there. If it goes, the last 5 years of my life are effectively deleted.
Mostly just the fact that there’s so much culture and history out there and it’s all disappearing (or worse, being modified and replaced) in front of our eyes. If I don’t save it, nobody else will.
That’s bad ass man, respect
So it’s kinda like you feel like data preservation is your calling, so to speak. That’s quite admirable.
I can think of several instances where archivists saved the day. Most notably when the BBC lost loads of episodes of Doctor Who, and thankfully, some fans had them recorded on VHS and were able to send them in.
It’s similar to the story about a lady that spent 24 hours a day recording live stuff to VHS from tv channels in the 80’s onwards. Turns out a lot of it was never saved by the broadcasters. She had some of it on literally thousands of tapes. Apparently she had like 6 recordings going on in parallell, all the time. Spending a lot of her time switching out tapes…
I guess you could call her an analogue horder? :)
She’s my hero.
That’s impressive. Only ones that has been removed, or in total?
Just the removed ones, the total’s over a million
Impressive. Can we access it, or is it a personal archive?
It’s infeasible to host the entire archive publicly the way it’s setup, but I put removed stuff people request on hobune.stream
How do you find out a video is gone from YT at that scale?