[Neil Jones]

Yes, so mamy youtube accounts who just download videos from elsewhere, including other youtube accounts and upload them to their channel. Often you can find several channels with the exact same video, often in terrible quality.

Sometimes this may help preserve a certain video if all other copies vanish from YouTube and the regular channels. After all a potatovision copy of something is probably better than nothing even if it has been poached from somewhere else.

Unless of course its wrapped around some other total fabrication ("15 minute music man" is the obvious example here) and then all bets are off as to what was real and what wasn't.

YouTube never was a safe haven for anything. Especially when the bots are on the crawl. The LostMediaWiki draws a very low benchmark here that if its not anywhere then its "lost". As we've seen, plonking things on YouTube doesn't make them any safer than they were before.

Until the bots went crazy things weren't too bad on YouTube. Now you can't even fart on there without it generating a strike. It may well be the era of archive TV and TV presentation on the platform is over and we end up back at the likes of TV-Ark and friends...

[James2001]

YouTube never was a safe haven for anything.  Especially when the bots are on the crawl.  The LostMediaWiki draws a very low benchmark here that if its not anywhere then its "lost". 

The rise of the whole "lost media" thing annoys me because it's really muddying the waters over what's genuinely missing and what's just not publicly available.

[Humphrey Hacker]

The rise of the whole "lost media" thing annoys me because it's really muddying the waters over what's genuinely missing and what's just not publicly available.

"Lost Media"as a concept has its good and bad aspects. Yes it can be great if a piece of genuine footage resurfaces and a respectful context/commentary can augment it but the good stuff is vastly outweighed by the cr*p particularly some of the videos on YouTube made by certain individuals who I won't name. We have to be very discerning.

[justinh]

Sometimes this may help preserve a certain video if all other copies vanish from YouTube and the regular channels.  After all a potatovision copy of something is probably better than nothing even if it has been poached from somewhere else.

Unless of course its wrapped around some other total fabrication ("15 minute music man" is the obvious example here) and then all bets are off as to what was real and what wasn't.

YouTube never was a safe haven for anything.  Especially when the bots are on the crawl.  The LostMediaWiki draws a very low benchmark here that if its not anywhere then its "lost".  As we've seen, plonking things on YouTube doesn't make them any safer than they were before.

Until the bots went crazy things weren't too bad on YouTube.  Now you can't even fart on there without it generating a strike. It may well be the era of archive TV and TV presentation on the platform is over and we end up back at the likes of TV-Ark and friends...

If the issue is the preservation of rare or lost media, then I think more copies of those files on different hard drives is ultimately a good thing. 

The YouTube remixes are objectively bad, but that's just an issue you'll get if you want to show mp4 files on the internet.

[Neil Jones]

"Lost Media"as a concept has its good and bad aspects. Yes it can be great if a piece of genuine footage resurfaces and a respectful context/commentary can augment it but the good stuff is vastly outweighed by the cr*p particularly some of the videos on YouTube made by certain individuals who I won't name. We have to be very discerning.

Lost Media in the context I used it, as alluded to by James2001 is a double edged sword.
It makes no distinction between something that's "lost" (as in Dr Who lost) and lost as in "it probably exists in a vault somewhere but I can't watch it at this point in time".

Its a known fact that a lot of stuff is "lost", but its lost for various reasons. LostMediaWiki goes all out to highlight stuff lost that was always going to be lost - at the moment their site rotating banner highlights a TV adaption the BBC did of a play - which was done in 1938. At that time TV was live, and the concept of recording anything to show later was another two decades away at least. Yes film was a thing but that got incredibly complicated for TV purposes and was also probably insanely expensive, to the point where it was cheaper just to invite the original performers back to do it all again live.

We all know about the archive purges of the 60s and 70s (and the later ones that were still going on until 1993) which is the other reason for "lost", and then there's the distinction between actually being lost and not being available which makes them as good as lost, even if they aren't physically missing. The examples are the TV work of those people who have fallen from grace in the meantime which ultimately means they aren't seen on TV again (if ever), but that doesn't automatically those tapes of the shows they made have to fall into a bonfire. though some might argue that's what needs to happen but that's beside the point.

Presentation and continuity is more niche though as I wouldn't be the least bit surprised of 99% of it we know about and can see is from off air recordings - many examples of course of TV companies being taken over and new management changing all the idents and the presentation package, and continuity is/was rarely preserved anyway outside of mandatory regulator recordings.

[Humphrey Hacker]

"Lost Media" is indeed a doubled edged sword but it's also a "catch all" term with no clear definitions which is why we must be discerning.

[Pips2022]

I never realised the classic noughts and crosses test card was ever used outside of the BBC. 1:40:34 on this VHS compilation shows it being used by Southern Television

youtu.be 

This video can only be viewed on YouTube.

[nwtv2003]

That’s right, Testcard F was used by many ITV companies from its inception throughout the 1970’s before they favoured other test patterns such as ETP-1 or PM5544.

[Steve in Pudsey]

Pedant's corner: it was never used by the ITV companies. It originated at the transmitter sites and was broadcast by the IBA.

[Stooky Bill]

A couple of other examples