You have probably heard of the video montage by Deadspin showing Sinclair TV news anchors reciting a scripted rant. My question is strictly factual using this an example of video production, and has nothing to do with the content, so please don’t bring it up.
To produce this video, Deadspin had to collect good-quality (i.e., not someone recording their TV with a cell phone camera) video of dozens of local TV news shows. I am assuming it was not known in advance this would happen (but I could be wrong).
To capture this live, you would have to be recording a live feed in each of those markets, since they are all local stations.
How can one, after the fact, collect footage from that many different local markets?
There is apparently a web service that allows people to pull these sorts of movies together.
A long time ago - let’s say 10 years ago - there was a nationwide commercial service that did the same thing. It recorded essentially every bit of local programming across the country and all the national feeds. That included basically every broadcast news show. You could then buy select clips from them for a lot of money. A recording of a single news segment might cost a few hundred dollars. I think it was more if there were research costs involved.
Law firms bought some of the recordings for evidence. The recordings could show the severity of a hurricane or car crash to support a damage claim. Slanderous statements might also be caught on the news or lawyers could try to show how adverse local news coverage may have tainted a jury pool against a client. Recordings on the scene might help to find witnesses.
The company that did the recordings did not have any particular copyrights to the recordings. In order to buy them, you needed to have what they considered to be a fair use purpose and in the end, the buyer was responsible for their copyright violations.
I believe SnapStream is what programs like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart used to create those clips showing someone saying one thing yesterday and the opposite thing six months ago. The use closed-captioning data to allow you to search the content for particular bits.
And I think, based on this tweet, that Deadspin used SnapStream for their montage.