8 ms·

Marion Stokes, the Woman Who Spent over 30 Years Recording Every Minute of US TV

201 points by austinallegro 2y ago

echelon 2y ago
I wonder what stations were recorded. It'd be pretty cool to go back and relive the Saturday morning cartoons of childhood, complete with commercials. Or see old news broadcasts that you remember watching during dinner.
- ChickeNES 2y ago
  There's a ton of that type of content on YouTube. I occasionally put on old commercials for background noise
- codetrotter 2y ago
  Have a look at https://www.myretrotvs.com/ https://www.myretrotvs.com/
- throwaway2046 2y ago
  AFAIK all the Marion Stokes tapes were digitized at the Internet Archive after her passing: https://archive.org/details/marionstokesvideo https://archive.org/details/marionstokesvideo
dotinvoke 2y ago
Now that people are training AI models for video this might actually be worth something as training data.
- water-your-self 2y ago
  Or, it may be useful for a massive archive of human history even.
- vasco 2y ago
  Culture isn't culture anymore, it's content to put ads around. People aren't artists, they are content creators. And now the final form, content is only useful past its ad serving ability if it can be used to train models.
  - hindsightbias 2y ago
    I went to a popular scenic spot to observe the people who collect there to watch content creators.
wiseowise 2y ago
What an amazing story of an amazing woman. Is there any laws or rights to protect her legacy? I can already feel lawyers salivating at it.
fbdab103 2y ago
As one might expect, these tapes eventually began to take up space — a lot of it. By investing in Apple stock, Stokes saved enough money to buy as many as nine additional apartments, which she used as storage units to hold all of her tapes. Why apartments vs storage units? More secure/humidity/pest controlled? Also, starting in 1979, I assume the raw price of the tapes was exorbitant.
- newzisforsukas 2y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30611323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30611323
- brcmthrowaway 2y ago
  Literally became rich from stock, like investing in NVIDIA today
  - irrational 2y ago
    Or, if you started investing in NVIDIA years ago. They just had a 10-1 stock split.
    - jonhohle 2y ago
      It’s not as if you get n shares priced at $x if you owned one share prices at $x. When a stock splits you get n shares each worth $x/n. The purpose is to lower the trading price for an individual share.
      - ghaff 2y ago
        It's more like a recognition that the sales price probably has gone up a lot and that management likely has some level of confidence that it will continue to increase--though that is of course not a guarantee that NVIDIA is a good investment today.
    - insane_dreamer 2y ago
      stock splits don't change the value of your holdings
iforgotpassword 2y ago
This is pretty impressive and all, and I'm glad this was actually archived and didn't just end up in a landfill, but at the risk of being that weird nerd... Why did she get one TV per recorder? I know very early models didn't have a tuner but it sounds she got them over time, so just hook them all up to one or two TVs, tune them to the appropriate channel and start recording!?
- rob74 2y ago
  I guess she also wanted to be able to conveniently see what all the VCRs were recording, at any time? Ok, several TV sets were expensive, but compared to the cost of all the tapes (not to mention the apartments she bought to store the tapes) I guess it was just a rounding error...
- ralferoo 2y ago
  Most VCRs were preset to output to UHF channel 36 (at least that's the UK numbering, it may be slightly different in the US), and so while recording different channels would be fine with multiple VCRs without a TV, watching the output from multiple VCRs wouldn't have been as easy. Maybe she wanted to be easily able to check what a particular VCR was recording without having to swap wires at the back of the TV. You could probably have made a giant coax switch box too, but it's unlikely they'd have been available commercially with more than just an A/B switch. There also used to be tuning screw accessible via a very small hole on most models in the UK, and you could re-tune it to output on a different channel that way, but sometimes you had to open up the VCR to get to that. Or maybe she just didn't know that was even possible. In any case, there would only have been so many spare channels for her to use before she started interfering with the broadcasts she was trying to capture. Maybe she just liked having a bank of screens that all had a different channel. I know my younger self would have thought that was pretty cool!
  - ghaff 2y ago
    In the US, as I recall, you typically chose whether to output to VHF 3 or 4.
jl6 2y ago
I’ve inherited a bunch of VHS tapes from around 2003-2008, mostly recordings of live broadcast football matches, including the commercial breaks. Who would I contact to work out if there’s any archival value to them? Part of me thinks they’re just not old enough and surely the stations had their own archives by that point, but part of me thinks they probably didn’t keep material in context with the ad breaks and possibly someone might find that interesting.
- nubinetwork 2y ago
  > archival value If you want copies of old TV shows that had bad DVD/BD copies, and can get through the VCR snow, then maybe... uploading that stuff anywhere would probably still incur the wrath of DMCA takedowns though, so personal use only. Back in the early 00s, I had a DVR and for the life of me, I couldn't get a clean copy of some shows. Stations would always throw junk on the screen, and some repeats of repeats would also have them (and sometimes weird cropping angles to boot)
- CaptArmchair 2y ago
  Take a peak on Reddit's /r/datahoarders or /r/datacurator. There's also https://wiki.archiveteam.org/ https://wiki.archiveteam.org/ who may point you in a direction. Sometimes stations do keep a record of their old broadcasts. But that depends on their size, organizational structure, funding, etc. some stuff is just lost to time simply because someone felt it was cheaper to just reuse tapes. As for value, that's hard to determine. Depends on what was taped, when, by whom and in what kind of context. That's where curation comes in to play.
- OJFord 2y ago
  Maybe you know this, but incredibly and amusingly (to me at least) it's sometimes the answer to post a comment here like yours, and someone appears saying [X] archival group will be happy to take them, email blah to arrange shipping. Of course, absence of that doesn't mean there's no value to anyone.
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  info at archive dot org
ubiquitysc 2y ago
Somewhat related, but Vanderbilt University has a TV news archive as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanderbilt_Television_News_Archive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanderbilt_Television_News_Arc...
- ghaff 2y ago
  A media professor of mine had a huge collection of political commercials (and other politically-oriented media) in pre-VHS video. He passed away quite young and I assume that material was lost to the sands of time at some point. A lot of pre-digital media sort of depended on someone making a really serious effort to preserve it in some manner.
Animats 2y ago
There was a Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago with a large archive of video tape of broadcast TV.[1] For decades, anyone could go there and ask to watch anything in the archive. But they closed over a year ago. They're looking for a new location, but that's been going on for a while now. [1] https://www.museum.tv/ https://www.museum.tv/
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  I can’t speak to the entire archive you mention, but the Internet Archive accepted and is processing the Marion Stokes collection. https://x.com/internetarchive/status/1393212448325308416 https://x.com/internetarchive/status/1393212448325308416 | https://archive.today/F0QDo https://archive.today/F0QDo https://x.com/internetarchive/status/1392996252866932736 https://x.com/internetarchive/status/1392996252866932736 | https://archive.today/LFmyQ https://archive.today/LFmyQ https://archive.org/details/marionstokesvideo https://archive.org/details/marionstokesvideo https://archive.org/details/marionstokestexts https://archive.org/details/marionstokestexts
  - snapsnail 2y ago
    Is there anywhere we can get a current status of this effort? At first glance there doesn't seem to be anywhere close to the full archive (there are only 182 items in that collection).
- GauntletWizard 2y ago
  There's also the Paley Center for Media[1], formerly the Museum of Television & Radio, in New York. They are unfortunately not completionist, but they do have good taste in what they do archive. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paley_Center_for_Media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paley_Center_for_Media
jonhohle 2y ago
I’m not sure if she has any type of cataloguing in place, but she almost certainly has some programs that never were published outside of broadcast and who I’ve had a hard time talking to anyone about licensing. If anyone has experience with any of this, please reach out, I’d be interest in learning more.
userbinator 2y ago
71k tapes, 400k hours. 480p H.264 (already better quality than VHS) can be encoded at around 300MB/h, so the whole collection would take approximately 120TB, or less than 10 LTO-9 tapes. It's always amazing to see the massive increase in storage density over time, although reliability is a different story; nonetheless, tape is an established good choice for long-term archival.
- tonetegeatinst 2y ago
  Does the IA have an archive collection where all that data sits? I search IA but multiple collections get shown with varying content and sizes
  - no_news_is 2y ago
    This comment has details https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40705086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40705086 Direct link to the videos https://archive.org/details/marionstokesvideo https://archive.org/details/marionstokesvideo
- dylan604 2y ago
  > (already better quality than VHS) This is misleading statement. If the recording format is better than the source format, it does not mean that the recording of the source will be better than the source. So I'm not really sure why this was added to all of the stats you've mentioned. Why not say that the LTO-9 tapes are better quality than VHS? You then go on to say that "can" be encoded at around 300MB/h, yet that is also very misleading. Nobody encoding VHS tape sources at 480p will be using that kind of bit rate. You have to be using some very strange settings to even be able to convince an encoder to allow that value, and even then the encoder is so efficient I doubt it would ever use that bandwidth.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - exe34 2y ago
    i think the aim was to put an upper bound on the estimate. so in practise it would cost less, much less perhaps.
sambull 2y ago
wonder what cool insights we can see now that AI can process this data; a history of how consent is manufactured by local media?
neilv 2y ago
As a kid, I'd videotape movies off broadcast TV onto VHS tapes. Only as an adult did I realize that the longer-term value of those recordings wasn't in the movies, but more in the ads I didn't always pause out, and -- most of all -- in the brief teasers of local news in the commercial breaks, which are probably lost to time.
- wanderingstan 2y ago
  I’ve noticed this phenomena all over. Same with our old home movies: they usually are of something like a high school graduation ceremony, but the really good parts are the times when the camera catches people talking normally, discussing plans for dinner that night or whatever.
  - seoulmetro 2y ago
    It's going to happen again with digital. You just won't know which parts you'll miss. It won't be street walking, it won't be selfies, it might be your home with boring videos of you cooking or looking in the fridge. No one records that anymore, but we used to with video tapes. I have a feeling we will really miss supermarket and retail interior footage with people actually shopping.
  - ip26 2y ago
    IMO the reason that's so priceless is because of how little of it was recorded. If there existed a vast archive of footage displaying mundane normalcy, you would quickly tune out.
TheAmazingRace 2y ago
I find it intriguing that she went all in on AAPL stock, but was also an avowed communist in life. I'd have to wonder how she managed to reconcile her political views with the fierce capitalist landscape of the stock market, and ultimately benefiting from her good fortune? Regardless, her contributions to archiving TV of the era is nothing short of impressive.
kristianp 2y ago
The article says she wanted to record the news as an important record of events. It's a contrast to these days, when news broadcasters are seen as sensationalists and at times politically motivated (by me anyway).

201 points by austinallegro 2y ago

I wonder what stations were recorded. It'd be pretty cool to go back and relive the Saturday morning cartoons of childhood, complete with commercials. Or see old news broadcasts that you remember watching during dinner.

ChickeNES 2y ago
There's a ton of that type of content on YouTube. I occasionally put on old commercials for background noise
codetrotter 2y ago
Have a look at https://www.myretrotvs.com/ https://www.myretrotvs.com/
throwaway2046 2y ago
AFAIK all the Marion Stokes tapes were digitized at the Internet Archive after her passing: https://archive.org/details/marionstokesvideo https://archive.org/details/marionstokesvideo

dotinvoke 2y ago

Now that people are training AI models for video this might actually be worth something as training data.

water-your-self 2y ago
Or, it may be useful for a massive archive of human history even.
vasco 2y ago
Culture isn't culture anymore, it's content to put ads around. People aren't artists, they are content creators. And now the final form, content is only useful past its ad serving ability if it can be used to train models.
- hindsightbias 2y ago
  I went to a popular scenic spot to observe the people who collect there to watch content creators.

wiseowise 2y ago

What an amazing story of an amazing woman. Is there any laws or rights to protect her legacy? I can already feel lawyers salivating at it.

fbdab103 2y ago

As one might expect, these tapes eventually began to take up space — a lot of it. By investing in Apple stock, Stokes saved enough money to buy as many as nine additional apartments, which she used as storage units to hold all of her tapes. Why apartments vs storage units? More secure/humidity/pest controlled? Also, starting in 1979, I assume the raw price of the tapes was exorbitant.

newzisforsukas 2y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30611323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30611323
brcmthrowaway 2y ago
Literally became rich from stock, like investing in NVIDIA today
- irrational 2y ago
  Or, if you started investing in NVIDIA years ago. They just had a 10-1 stock split.
  - jonhohle 2y ago
    It’s not as if you get n shares priced at $x if you owned one share prices at $x. When a stock splits you get n shares each worth $x/n. The purpose is to lower the trading price for an individual share.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      It's more like a recognition that the sales price probably has gone up a lot and that management likely has some level of confidence that it will continue to increase--though that is of course not a guarantee that NVIDIA is a good investment today.
  - insane_dreamer 2y ago
    stock splits don't change the value of your holdings

iforgotpassword 2y ago

This is pretty impressive and all, and I'm glad this was actually archived and didn't just end up in a landfill, but at the risk of being that weird nerd... Why did she get one TV per recorder? I know very early models didn't have a tuner but it sounds she got them over time, so just hook them all up to one or two TVs, tune them to the appropriate channel and start recording!?

rob74 2y ago
I guess she also wanted to be able to conveniently see what all the VCRs were recording, at any time? Ok, several TV sets were expensive, but compared to the cost of all the tapes (not to mention the apartments she bought to store the tapes) I guess it was just a rounding error...
ralferoo 2y ago
Most VCRs were preset to output to UHF channel 36 (at least that's the UK numbering, it may be slightly different in the US), and so while recording different channels would be fine with multiple VCRs without a TV, watching the output from multiple VCRs wouldn't have been as easy. Maybe she wanted to be easily able to check what a particular VCR was recording without having to swap wires at the back of the TV. You could probably have made a giant coax switch box too, but it's unlikely they'd have been available commercially with more than just an A/B switch. There also used to be tuning screw accessible via a very small hole on most models in the UK, and you could re-tune it to output on a different channel that way, but sometimes you had to open up the VCR to get to that. Or maybe she just didn't know that was even possible. In any case, there would only have been so many spare channels for her to use before she started interfering with the broadcasts she was trying to capture. Maybe she just liked having a bank of screens that all had a different channel. I know my younger self would have thought that was pretty cool!
- ghaff 2y ago
  In the US, as I recall, you typically chose whether to output to VHF 3 or 4.

jl6 2y ago

I’ve inherited a bunch of VHS tapes from around 2003-2008, mostly recordings of live broadcast football matches, including the commercial breaks. Who would I contact to work out if there’s any archival value to them? Part of me thinks they’re just not old enough and surely the stations had their own archives by that point, but part of me thinks they probably didn’t keep material in context with the ad breaks and possibly someone might find that interesting.

nubinetwork 2y ago
> archival value If you want copies of old TV shows that had bad DVD/BD copies, and can get through the VCR snow, then maybe... uploading that stuff anywhere would probably still incur the wrath of DMCA takedowns though, so personal use only. Back in the early 00s, I had a DVR and for the life of me, I couldn't get a clean copy of some shows. Stations would always throw junk on the screen, and some repeats of repeats would also have them (and sometimes weird cropping angles to boot)
CaptArmchair 2y ago
Take a peak on Reddit's /r/datahoarders or /r/datacurator. There's also https://wiki.archiveteam.org/ https://wiki.archiveteam.org/ who may point you in a direction. Sometimes stations do keep a record of their old broadcasts. But that depends on their size, organizational structure, funding, etc. some stuff is just lost to time simply because someone felt it was cheaper to just reuse tapes. As for value, that's hard to determine. Depends on what was taped, when, by whom and in what kind of context. That's where curation comes in to play.
OJFord 2y ago
Maybe you know this, but incredibly and amusingly (to me at least) it's sometimes the answer to post a comment here like yours, and someone appears saying [X] archival group will be happy to take them, email blah to arrange shipping. Of course, absence of that doesn't mean there's no value to anyone.
toomuchtodo 2y ago
info at archive dot org

ubiquitysc 2y ago

Somewhat related, but Vanderbilt University has a TV news archive as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanderbilt_Television_News_Archive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanderbilt_Television_News_Arc...

ghaff 2y ago
A media professor of mine had a huge collection of political commercials (and other politically-oriented media) in pre-VHS video. He passed away quite young and I assume that material was lost to the sands of time at some point. A lot of pre-digital media sort of depended on someone making a really serious effort to preserve it in some manner.

Animats 2y ago

There was a Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago with a large archive of video tape of broadcast TV.[1] For decades, anyone could go there and ask to watch anything in the archive. But they closed over a year ago. They're looking for a new location, but that's been going on for a while now. [1] https://www.museum.tv/ https://www.museum.tv/

toomuchtodo 2y ago
I can’t speak to the entire archive you mention, but the Internet Archive accepted and is processing the Marion Stokes collection. https://x.com/internetarchive/status/1393212448325308416 https://x.com/internetarchive/status/1393212448325308416 | https://archive.today/F0QDo https://archive.today/F0QDo https://x.com/internetarchive/status/1392996252866932736 https://x.com/internetarchive/status/1392996252866932736 | https://archive.today/LFmyQ https://archive.today/LFmyQ https://archive.org/details/marionstokesvideo https://archive.org/details/marionstokesvideo https://archive.org/details/marionstokestexts https://archive.org/details/marionstokestexts
- snapsnail 2y ago
  Is there anywhere we can get a current status of this effort? At first glance there doesn't seem to be anywhere close to the full archive (there are only 182 items in that collection).
GauntletWizard 2y ago
There's also the Paley Center for Media[1], formerly the Museum of Television & Radio, in New York. They are unfortunately not completionist, but they do have good taste in what they do archive. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paley_Center_for_Media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paley_Center_for_Media

jonhohle 2y ago

I’m not sure if she has any type of cataloguing in place, but she almost certainly has some programs that never were published outside of broadcast and who I’ve had a hard time talking to anyone about licensing. If anyone has experience with any of this, please reach out, I’d be interest in learning more.

userbinator 2y ago

71k tapes, 400k hours. 480p H.264 (already better quality than VHS) can be encoded at around 300MB/h, so the whole collection would take approximately 120TB, or less than 10 LTO-9 tapes. It's always amazing to see the massive increase in storage density over time, although reliability is a different story; nonetheless, tape is an established good choice for long-term archival.

tonetegeatinst 2y ago
Does the IA have an archive collection where all that data sits? I search IA but multiple collections get shown with varying content and sizes
- no_news_is 2y ago
  This comment has details https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40705086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40705086 Direct link to the videos https://archive.org/details/marionstokesvideo https://archive.org/details/marionstokesvideo
dylan604 2y ago
> (already better quality than VHS) This is misleading statement. If the recording format is better than the source format, it does not mean that the recording of the source will be better than the source. So I'm not really sure why this was added to all of the stats you've mentioned. Why not say that the LTO-9 tapes are better quality than VHS? You then go on to say that "can" be encoded at around 300MB/h, yet that is also very misleading. Nobody encoding VHS tape sources at 480p will be using that kind of bit rate. You have to be using some very strange settings to even be able to convince an encoder to allow that value, and even then the encoder is so efficient I doubt it would ever use that bandwidth.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- exe34 2y ago
  i think the aim was to put an upper bound on the estimate. so in practise it would cost less, much less perhaps.

sambull 2y ago

wonder what cool insights we can see now that AI can process this data; a history of how consent is manufactured by local media?

neilv 2y ago

As a kid, I'd videotape movies off broadcast TV onto VHS tapes. Only as an adult did I realize that the longer-term value of those recordings wasn't in the movies, but more in the ads I didn't always pause out, and -- most of all -- in the brief teasers of local news in the commercial breaks, which are probably lost to time.

wanderingstan 2y ago
I’ve noticed this phenomena all over. Same with our old home movies: they usually are of something like a high school graduation ceremony, but the really good parts are the times when the camera catches people talking normally, discussing plans for dinner that night or whatever.
- seoulmetro 2y ago
  It's going to happen again with digital. You just won't know which parts you'll miss. It won't be street walking, it won't be selfies, it might be your home with boring videos of you cooking or looking in the fridge. No one records that anymore, but we used to with video tapes. I have a feeling we will really miss supermarket and retail interior footage with people actually shopping.
- ip26 2y ago
  IMO the reason that's so priceless is because of how little of it was recorded. If there existed a vast archive of footage displaying mundane normalcy, you would quickly tune out.

TheAmazingRace 2y ago

I find it intriguing that she went all in on AAPL stock, but was also an avowed communist in life. I'd have to wonder how she managed to reconcile her political views with the fierce capitalist landscape of the stock market, and ultimately benefiting from her good fortune? Regardless, her contributions to archiving TV of the era is nothing short of impressive.

kristianp 2y ago

The article says she wanted to record the news as an important record of events. It's a contrast to these days, when news broadcasters are seen as sensationalists and at times politically motivated (by me anyway).