Jump to content

Old Audio/Radio broadcasta


jabba72

Recommended Posts

I have no idea. I think WBAL has a large collection of games. Back in the day, every now and then on a winter night, when they really didn't have any other programming locally, they would play a game on the radio. I remember listening to Chuck Thompson call Jim Palmer's no hitter from 1969.

Today, everything is digital, so I assume it is being stored somewhere. But the old games (pre-2000) are probably only on tape and either wasting away somewhere or are long gone.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 months later...
On 10/5/2016 at 6:53 AM, JohnBKistler said:

I have no idea. I think WBAL has a large collection of games. Back in the day, every now and then on a winter night, when they really didn't have any other programming locally, they would play a game on the radio. I remember listening to Chuck Thompson call Jim Palmer's no hitter from 1969.

Today, everything is digital, so I assume it is being stored somewhere. But the old games (pre-2000) are probably only on tape and either wasting away somewhere or are long gone.

IMO it is most likely that anything originated by a commercial entity (radio station, TV station, etc.) is probably long gone.  Exceptions of course would be World Series and All-Star games and other high-profile games.  Maintaining a vault is an expensive proposition for many reasons, one due to environmental requirements.  Audio and video tape have a limited shelf life even under ideal conditions.  Iron oxide loses its orientation over time and even more destructive is its tendency to separate from its backing after a few decades have passed.  Temperature and humidity control help, but as I said that's expensive and the amount of physical media that builds up over the course of a season would be much larger than most people expect.

With the shift to file-based media production, especially in the last five  years or so, the cost of storage has become much less, but the economic imperative is still a factor.  If you're ESPN and you're always going back to the footage, then it pays to keep it fresh and easily accessible.  If you're a local station under the thumb of bean counters with no imagination then it's an unnecessary cost and you quickly wipe it so the physical media can be reused..  

There's also the question of format.  From the late 1950's to the early 1980's most videotape was recorded onto two-inch quad-head machines of which there might be a dozen still in operation across the US.  Maybe.  We've seen another half-dozen video formats gain popularity since, only to be superseded to something of even higher quality.  Problem is that something has to be pretty important to keep transferring it from one format to the next.  It's expensive.  Snow White is a no-brainer, O's vs. Angels in August, 1981 maybe not so much.  Audio has followed a similar trajectory, but is intrinsically less complex.  

If WBAL has had the foresight to maintain an archive of Orioles games then it deserves a great deal of credit.  It was a conscious decision, not necessarily made with a clear understanding of downstream profitability.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...