This is one technical point that younger people are often amazed to hear, that for a long time the overwhelming majority of TV broadcast was perfectly ephemeral, producing no records at all. Not just that the original copies were lost or never digitised or impossible to track down or whatever, but that nothing of the sort ever existed. The technology for capturing, broadcasting, and displaying a TV signal is so much easier than the tech for recording one, that there were several decades when the only recordings of TV came from someone setting up a literal film camera pointed at a TV and capturing the screen on photographic film, and that didn’t happen much.
(This also meant that old TV was amazingly low latency. The camera sensor scanned through, producing the signal, which went through some analog circuitry and straight onto the air, into the circuitry of your TV and right onto the screen. The scanning of the electron beam across the screen was synchronised with the scanning of the camera sensor. At no point was even a single frame stored—I need to check the numbers but I think if you were close to the TV station, you’re looking at the top of the frame before the bottom of the frame is even captured by the camera)
This is one technical point that younger people are often amazed to hear, that for a long time the overwhelming majority of TV broadcast was perfectly ephemeral, producing no records at all. Not just that the original copies were lost or never digitised or impossible to track down or whatever, but that nothing of the sort ever existed. The technology for capturing, broadcasting, and displaying a TV signal is so much easier than the tech for recording one, that there were several decades when the only recordings of TV came from someone setting up a literal film camera pointed at a TV and capturing the screen on photographic film, and that didn’t happen much.
(This also meant that old TV was amazingly low latency. The camera sensor scanned through, producing the signal, which went through some analog circuitry and straight onto the air, into the circuitry of your TV and right onto the screen. The scanning of the electron beam across the screen was synchronised with the scanning of the camera sensor. At no point was even a single frame stored—I need to check the numbers but I think if you were close to the TV station, you’re looking at the top of the frame before the bottom of the frame is even captured by the camera)