Trying to set it up now seems nearly impossible, but if they planned for it then it may have been possible.
Recording ~5 hours of television a night would have been a trivial cost for a network like NBC. Particularly compared to the licensing fees those hours would have had.
In general, the affiliate nature would add a wrinkle to the whole thing, but not an insurmountable one. If nothing else, they could have used the broadcast from the affiliates they owned.
You've quite a few barriers to getting that stuff online.
1. Sure, someone taped 6 hours onto a junk tape of TV from some channel to catch one show. But then they likely taped over that, again and again.
2. Tapes are bulky. VHS in general and junk tapes in particular would have been viewed by most people as low value junk that was tempting to disposed of. That's especially true during the decade or two before nostalgia and retro-cool starts making old junk more desirable.
3. Tapes degrade. Even if someone kept them, they might not be readable and/or gum up the VCR you're trying to use to read them.
4. VHS digitization equipment is also old. Apparently newer capture cards aren't very good compared to older ones, and there are specialized devices to fix signal errors (TBCs), allowing capture cards to actually work, that are becoming hard to find and expensive.
5. It takes a lot of time. VCRs play tapes at 1x speed. So if you want to digitize a 6 hour tape, it's going to take at least 6 hours.
I have a small personal project of cataloging all the movies that played on television in the 90s. There are tons of television shows that are not only not available on DVD or VHS but also seemingly no one has it. Double goes for cartoons, tons just totally unavailable. It is sad.
Hence shows were wiped in the past (since they could never be shown again) and even surviving shows can't be released without a lot of work.
Hook those up, record to DVD.
Rip DVD.
No need to fool with terrible capture cards they sucked back in the day and have not improved. The biggest problem I found with VHS is mold growth.
Edit: bonus with dvd recorders is that some have firewire ports so ripping portable video vamera tapes is automatic.
Any plans to publish this list? Would surely make a super interesting git repo for example...
If you message me privately I'd be happy to share the data. The git repos are:
https://github.com/patsmad/nyt-listings https://github.com/patsmad/nyt-listings-app
I use them for curation at the moment so the READMEs leave ... something to be desired. I hope by the end of August to have a read-only version up and running, although without a wikipedia-like effort I don't see how I would curate it fully so it'll probably always be a little touch and go as to what data is available.
The stats I have from curating are: 369345 individual movie "listing boxes" (I would guess around 98% accuracy, although if I were to field a guess the actual number there should be is probably 400K) of which 321308 are matched to a movie, and 296941 of those are for sure unique. And overall 202203 have channel + time + duration matched up using the VCR listings (which the New York Times conveniently published from around November 20th 1990, and the internet archive very nicely has the program the VCRs used to encode/decode those codes). There are 21530 unique movies at the moment.
If I understand the New York Times correctly, then none of this can be commercialized since I scraped the core data (the pages themselves) from the TimesMachine, so this really is a personal project, which I'm happy to share. I've made a few Letterboxd lists from the corresponding data, for example a series of lists with all of the movies (and play times) for films playing on September 1 in particular e.g. https://letterboxd.com/patsmad/list/television-films-septemb... It is rather consistent, around 100 films a day, for 1990-1999 it was 106, 118, 74, 74, 89, 99, 98, 110, 97, 93. As is obvious I can talk about this for days.
I'm not sure the best way to do private messages, my email is associated with this account, but I have no idea if you can see that. I usually just lurk on HN.
Broadcast-grade video tape cassettes were expensive even in bulk, and all tape requires climate-controlled archival storage since heat and especially humidity are quickly destructive to the adhesives that hold the magnetic layer to the substrate. (If you'd like more detail here, the term of art for this failure mode is "sticky-shed syndrome". While it's obviously more of a problem now than then, archival needs were understood at the time.)
Depending on format (Betacam SP or U-Matic), an open-ended commitment to preserving all programming would involve adding at minimum 2/3 to 1 cassette per hour of programming - more if you want multiple copies. So your running costs start out sizable and only grow over time, in search of a highly speculative payoff that at best won't be realized for years to decades.