"The Impossible Stream": How much television would Fry have watched?

[on:]

I wonder if it is possible to use MATH! to calculate how much TV Fry watched when he watched every TV show ever made.
Not sure where to start with this calculation but it'd be some sort of extrapolation from current and historical TV production rates to estimate the number of hours of TV produced before 3023. The introduction of streaming services might shake the numbers around somewhat.
(Also: does this include "lost media"? And TV shows in other languages, with Fry either watching translations or uncomprehendingly watching the originals? :p )
My guess before doing the math is that it would be a ludicrously large number of hours, that make the final 13020 episodes seem barely significant in comparison :p

[Reply #1 on:]

He can’t actually watch them all. Too many videotapes were destroyed during the second coming of Jesus.

(The history of lost - not just currently unavailable, but actually gone for good - TV shows is actually rather interesting. The earliest sitcoms and the entire Dumont network library are gone forever.)

[Reply #2 on:]

Particularly live broadcasts are generally lost from the early eras of TV, and some even all the way to the 1990s.  Basically, TV cameras did not record, but just transmitted.  While the technology existed to record the transmission, it was not really considered important, because storage was also expensive.  And since home recording really first boomed in the 1980s, live broadcast prior to that is generally considered lost.  Additionally, both at home and at TV stations, reusing old tapes was not uncommon.

Honestly, I am not sure media that is readily available today will be available in 1000 years.

[Reply #3 on:]

Honestly, I am not sure media that is readily available today will be available in 1000 years.

Indeed. Perhaps in a thousand years the only readable media from the 21^st Century will be film, vinyl records, analog magnetic tape, and print.

That's why I'm somewhat of a data hoarder. Data is ephemeral. I routinely save copies of webpages that have info important to me. One annoying quirk of Firefox is that when you download a webpage locally, the download fails near the end and you have to click retry to save it.

Physical storage formats and data formats come and go. Whenever you see something on the internet that's important to you, save a copy locally.

[Reply #4 on:]

A lot of stuff was also just literally destroyed. Burned or dumped into a river. Even actually filmed stuff wasn’t considered important enough to preserve. About 50% of films made before about 1950 just don’t exist anymore, and it’s a much higher proportion of silent films.

In internet parlance, “lost” had to come to mean “I can’t currently watch My Cousin Skeeter anywhere because it’s not currently available,” but that’s the real original definition. Of course, as so much stuff has gone digital there are similar risks now.

[Reply #5 on:]

Particularly live broadcasts are generally lost from the early eras of TV, and some even all the way to the 1990s.  Basically, TV cameras did not record, but just transmitted.  While the technology existed to record the transmission, it was not really considered important, because storage was also expensive.  And since home recording really first boomed in the 1980s, live broadcast prior to that is generally considered lost.  Additionally, both at home and at TV stations, reusing old tapes was not uncommon.

Honestly, I am not sure media that is readily available today will be available in 1000 years.

Sometimes I get really sad finding out that a favourite song by a favourite group or artist in the 60s was performed on television, only for the tapes to be wiped afterwards.   They didn't realise that such things would be of cultural or historical importance in the future, and tape was expensive.  Easier to wipe it or record over it.    And don't get me started about the Universal music fire. 

[Reply #6 on:]

I know Fry said he was going to watch every show ever made, but doesn't he just settle in on watching the entirety of that streaming service's library? My memory was that that was certainly the implication -- so it'd probably just be the equivalent of watching every TV series on Netflix.