Suppose that I want to watch the baseball game on August 14, 1978 between the Dodgers and the Cubs. (I’m making that game up).
How would I go about doing so? Does video of it exist somewhere? Is it available to the public? What if I were a producer from ESPN and wanted that footage to put together a package of videos?
How far back in time are all games in the different professional sports archived, and by whom?
The broadcasts stay property of the broadcaster… typically when you see an highlight on SportsCenter the local network doing the broadcast is credited on screen.
So, hopefully for your sake, WGN (or whoever broadcast the Dodgers in 1978) has spent a lot of money on maintaining a tape library going back to the 70s and its just a matter of going looking for it.
I assume also that if they do maintain such libraries, they don’t respond to every average joe who wants to see a bit of video tape and they’d probably want to know why you are so interested and they have every right to say, nope, we have it, but you can’t have it.
And there’s also the “broadcast disclaimer”… if you wanted to rebroadcast/redistribute said video, you’d have get MLB and the Cubs and/or Dodgers involved.
Does MLB itself then NOT collect and archive such game films? I would have naively assumed it would do so…