They do retain certain clips from past episodes that are available on their site, but not the intact full episode.
My question- in the modern digital age, there has to be some digital archive where major networks like NBC keep intact full episodes from days, weeks, months, years, probably even a decade or more ago. Or: am I wrong, and intact full episodes of morning news programs are deemed so ephemeral and insignificant that no digital copies are retained anywhere, regardless of modern storage capabilities?
Of course, anyone nowadays can record an episode of a daily or nightly news/entertainment show and post in on Youtube for perpetuity- although it violates certain copyright laws, I’m not even sure places like Youtube or the general public even care anymore when it comes to something minor like a morning show episode.
Problem is, no one on Youtube seems to care much about uploading and preserving Today Show episodes, especially not in their entirety, or on a regular basis.
Does anyone know where I could watch this past Saturday’s episode- September 7th 2024- in it’s entirety?
Peacock has them all. You just need a subscription. They’re copyrighted and NBC makes money off charging people for them. Full episodes will never be free on Youtube.
I thought they would offer full episodes to the public, but they don’t appear to be on their streaming service as you reported. Just the clips are available. I’m sure the network has full copies of every episode, but they just don’t make them public. It could be that the demand is so low that it’s not worth the cost but there may be other reasons I’m unaware of.
Storage is dirt cheap, but streaming is not. Just because it’s not being offered to viewers doesn’t mean it isn’t backed up somewhere (probably many many different somewheres).
I imagine they archive much more than 3 days’ worth in a database somewhere. Certainly the existence of Brian Williams rapping based on clips from the nightly news means that they have a lot of episodes to choose from.
The entire history of the Today show was unlikely to be saved. Videotapes and Kinescope film weren’t preserved much early on due to cost so a lot of early TV shows are lost forever. The OP must be correct that recordings of Today have been saved for decades, the cost was already becoming trivial before modern digital storage, and old tapes would have been transferred to digital storage when it became practical.
