June 12, 2007
Golden Era TV meets the Digital Age
Old time television is making a comeback. Not on television, though. On the Internet. The Los Angeles Times reports.
For members of Generation X-Box, it's a chance to see what prehistoric television looked like. Fifty-year-old Heinz Ketchup TV and Cocoa Puff commercials conjure a distant era, as well as the forgotten 1950s sci-fi serials like "Captain Midnight" and "Rocky Jones, Space Ranger."
Indeed, as television collectors large and small continue to digitize and upload thousands of rare old film reels and videotapes, YouTube is threatening to become a repository of television history that could rival the nation's leading broadcast museums, both in the scope of its offerings and in the number of people it can reach.
Ron Simon, curator of the Paley Center for Media (formerly the Museum of Television and Radio), said that collectors have traditionally been very possessive, preferring to keep their archives out of the public view. But with the arrival of video sharing sites, that mentality is changing. "YouTube has encouraged the whole collector community to put examples of their material out there," he said.
[via The TV Barn Ticker]
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