cincywx
Member
As someone who works in local TV news, it should be known (and this may surprise some people) that TV stations aren't always recording their own air streams. We simply don't have enough storage capacity to do it, especially with a total of six channels over-the-air (our main channel with our NBC affiliation, and five subchannels).
We have a service that records web streams of all the channels that are kept for several days, primarily for reviewing what happened during any technical problems (so clients don't get billed for commercials that didn't actually air, for example). We can clip and save footage from these but the process is tedious and the quality isn't great.
We do have recordings set up to roll on all of our newscasts in-house, but anything such as long-form severe weather coverage that airs outside of normal newscast timeframes won't be captured unless someone remembers to manually start a recording when it begins; and sets it up to run long enough for the duration of the coverage (the default on our system is one hour).
thank you for the incredible insight as always. i just assumed tv stations archived it all (foolishly thinking that it could be stored digitally with ease, but of course, storage isn’t endless) but this explains a lot!