Megan Skiendel: I've been thinking about this one since Tuesday — which, fair warning, means I have opinions. How are you with accounting logic as a form of cultural destruction?
David Sterling: Strong framing. What's the case.
Megan Skiendel: The Tonight Show. Johnny Carson. NBC erased most of the broadcasts from 1962 to 1972 — not because anyone hated television history, but because a single two-inch quad tape cost the equivalent of two thousand dollars today, and the machines to play them ran around three hundred thousand. Once a broadcast's rerun window closed, the tape became a liability. Erasure recovered the asset.
David Sterling: That's — wait, that's not negligence, that's a balance sheet. Someone made a rational call.
Megan Skiendel: Rational given what they knew, yes. And the technology was barely broken in — Ampex had only demonstrated the first practical quad system at the NAB show in Chicago in 1956. NBC was running it at Burbank by 1958. So you're four years into a new medium and already the economics are structured around reuse, not retention.
David Sterling: Frankly, that's the part I want to stress-test. Was anyone modeling the downside of guessing wrong about future value?
Megan Skiendel: That's exactly where it breaks. The Library of Congress put out a report in 1997 documenting the scale of American television loss — 1997. Decades after the decisions. Which tells you no one was running that model in 1965, because if they were, someone would have flagged it.
David Sterling: The cost of being wrong wasn't in the room when the decision was made.
Megan Skiendel: And that's the thing that keeps nagging at me — it's not just that the cost was in the room. The erasability was built in from the start. Like, the whole point of magnetic tape was that you could wipe it and go again. That wasn't a misuse of the technology. That was the technology.
David Sterling: Walk me through that. Because I want the plain version.
Megan Skiendel: Think of it like renting a storage unit for a piece of furniture. While the furniture is sellable — someone will pay for it — the rent makes sense. The moment nobody will buy it, you're just paying rent on junk. So you clear it out. That's exactly what NBC was doing with those Carson tapes. The syndication window closes, the tape stops being an asset, and now you're just paying to store junk. Except the junk is Johnny Carson.
David Sterling: That's — yeah. Asset-to-liability flip the second the rerun window shuts.
Megan Skiendel: Exactly. And Klik — 2021, published through Sagepub — puts it precisely: erasure was not an accident per se but a fulfillment of a logic designed into the apparatus of magnetic tape recording from its very inception. The erasability wasn't a flaw someone exploited. It was the feature that made the economics work from day one.
David Sterling: Which means — wait, actually — the BBC building a formal videotape archive in 1978 is almost more damning than the wiping itself. They could have done it earlier. They just didn't.
Megan Skiendel: 1978. Which is a decade after the peak wiping period. The BFI puts the loss at roughly two-thirds of 1960s-70s broadcast output. Two-thirds. And the archive shows up after.
David Sterling: The template for saving things existed — they had film archives going back to the thirties. They just never applied it to tape. Which means the designed-in logic wasn't just economic. It was institutional permission.
Megan Skiendel: Right — but the template existing is actually what makes this worse. Because the BBC film library wasn't just sitting there passively. It was actively maintained. Someone's job was to preserve film. And that person's counterpart for videotape either didn't exist or wasn't in the same building as the overseas sales department.
David Sterling: Wait — the commercial side and the archive side weren't talking?
Megan Skiendel: Organizationally separate. The people handling overseas sales — who actually knew which tapes had residual commercial value — weren't routing anything to a library. Because there was no videotape library to route it to. So a tape with genuine syndication potential abroad just... cycled back into the reuse pile.
David Sterling: That's the unrepresented stakeholder problem, isn't it. The overseas buyer who would've paid for that tape in 1974 had zero standing in the 1971 erasure decision.
Megan Skiendel: And kinescope survived almost by accident for exactly the opposite reason — film slotted into infrastructure that already existed. Someone in the film library knew what to do with it. Tape had no institutional home, so it defaulted to the operations department, and operations departments reuse things.
David Sterling: Which is a different failure mode than pure cost accounting. That's — I mean, the economics didn't require destruction. The org chart did.
Megan Skiendel: Here's the one that still gets me. ABC Weekend TV and Associated-Rediffusion — their archives weren't wiped because storage was expensive. They were wiped after the 1968 merger into Thames Television. Someone sat in a room and decided what the new company needed to keep. That is a person making a call, not a balance sheet.
David Sterling: A corporate event triggered mass destruction. Not economics — a merger.
Megan Skiendel: And that pattern — the licensing department and the archive function not being in the same conversation — honestly, that's replicating right now. Streaming platforms, rights expiry, shutdowns. The erase button just looks different. We'll get there.
David Sterling: Same erase button, different interface. Because that's what a licensing expiration actually is — the syndication window logic, just running on a server. The show stops generating revenue, the deal lapses, and it's gone. No preservation mandate. No institutional archive stepping in.
Megan Skiendel: And no physical object to even go looking for. Imagine a showrunner — her series launched on a streaming service in 2019, the platform folds in 2022, she's trying to show the work to a festival programmer in 2025. Not a scratched tape. Not a degraded kinescope. A broken link.
David Sterling: That's — the absence is invisible. At least a wiped tape left a shell.
Megan Skiendel: Exactly. And no Library of Congress report catches it in real time — the 1997 report documented losses that happened thirty years prior. We're inside that window right now. Digital preservation policy is nowhere near keeping pace with how fast platforms are distributing and then dropping content.
David Sterling: The BBC archive lag — 1978, a decade after peak wiping. You're saying we're in the equivalent moment.
Megan Skiendel: We are. And the structural excuse is actually weaker now — digital storage is cheap, the $2,000-per-tape cost argument doesn't hold. But rights windows, licensing expiry, platform closure? Those are doing the same work. The economics just moved from physical scarcity to contractual structure.
David Sterling: Which means no current streaming contract prices in future cultural value either. Same gap — no 1965 balance sheet could do it, and frankly no 2024 licensing deal does it.
Megan Skiendel: And there's no institutional equivalent of a national archive intervening. The BBC eventually built the 1978 archive — imperfect, late, but it existed. What's the streaming equivalent? I mean, I don't — I genuinely don't see it.
David Sterling: The unrepresented stakeholder is the same one. Future audiences, future scholars — zero standing in the deal that just expired.
Megan Skiendel: Not the scale of loss — the BFI's two-thirds estimate, NBC wiping Carson, the Associated-Rediffusion archive going into the Thames merger and just... not coming out. It's that none of it required malice. The Ampex machine showed up in Chicago in 1956, and the economics were already written. The erasability was the feature. The loss was downstream of that — institutionally amplified, sure, but the logic was baked in from the first demonstration.
David Sterling: I think that's the honest place to sit with it. Rational for the person holding the eraser. Catastrophic for everyone who wasn't in the room — which was everyone who came after. Same gap, whether it's 1965 or a streaming contract lapsing in 2023. The unrepresented stakeholder doesn't get a vote.
Megan Skiendel: You framed it at the top as accounting logic as cultural destruction. I think I'd — actually, no, I wouldn't change that framing. I'd just add: the destruction wasn't the point. The accounting was the point. The destruction was what the accounting felt like from the outside, fifty years later.
