[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.