I admittedly haven't looked into this at all, but I suspect a majority aren't available on DVD, particularly the ones from the 80s and 90s.
"Thousands of hours of historical Sesame Street" is exactly the type of content that streaming services should be making economically viable for the first time.
> "Thousands of hours of historical Sesame Street" is exactly the type of content that streaming should be making economically viable for the first time.
Broadly, it does, but the countless historic episodes (of many things) are not sitting there as nicely encoded video files with cleared distribution rights.
Much work will not have been well-archived in the first place (if at all), nor catalogued well (if at all), and there will be performers and musicians and other contributors who may have various rights that need to be identified and negotiated before a legitimate streaming site can air it.
In all, it makes the per-item preparatory effort quite high and means that most old stuff will be left to volunteer, underground distribution for a very long time.
>there will be performers and musicians and other contributors who may have various rights that need to be identified and negotiated before a legitimate streaming site can air it.
For example, there are pretty well-known TV series like Northern Exposure and WKRP in Cincinnati that are only available in essentially bowdlerized form because the music that was such a key part of the shows was never licensed beyond original TV use.
I don’t know much about marketing, let alone about marketing decades old television shows, but it would surprise me if doing the work to stream all of that were economically viable, let alone more economically viable than other things HBO could work on instead. Ten or twenty “best of” episodes (with “best of” decided by both content, licensing, and the quality of available recordings) might be economically viable, but thousands of episodes?
> "Thousands of hours of historical Sesame Street" is exactly the type of content that streaming services should be making economically viable for the first time.
I see what you mean, but if we are at all concerned about preservation of old media, a streaming platform is useless unless we are able to download it without any form of restriction. I doubt most platforms would be okay with that, because it would remove part of the incentive of continuing to subscribe to their platform.
If I recall correctly, Netflix and Hulu both have some form of "offline access" to certain content that their studios produced, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is some sort heavy handed DRM associated with that.
To make things more frustrating, consider this: Plenty of streaming services that have already come and gone. Most of those platforms had some amount of original content on it. Once the platform shut their servers off, viewers lost any form of access to it (assuming that there wasn't a workaround to download a local copy.) Theoretically, that media could pop up on another platform in the future if some deal is worked out between studios, but, I find it extremely unlikely, and even less likely that all of it would ever be available on a singular source. That is to say, there is a near guarantee that there is a growing amount of media that we will never have never know about, let alone have the chance to see.
Technology seems to rotate through various trends. The only realistic possibility that I see of us finding any kind of long term solution to this issue is if there is a sudden, overwhelming shift back towards physical media (DVDs, Blu-ray, etc.) Without unrestricted physical access, the ability to access "lost" content is merely a expiration date, either by a subscription ending, or a platform dying off.
The less likely alternative that I can think of would be some kind of gentlemen's agreement. Each time a new piece of content is created, a preserved copy is provided to a third party source, to be made public if that piece of content is no longer accessible. Something along the lines of how the Library of Congress works. I just don't see any studio being particularly interested in humoring that type of arrangement, unless it was a legal requirement, or something that was demanded through unions like Screen Actors Guild, Writer's Guild of America, etc.
DVD box sets.
Pirate sites.