Pretty simple: they have a contract with ABC they're obligated to fulfill. If they don't, the hundreds of people they employ in their film archive and library, the grants they give to the film preservation community and various educational programs — all of that goes away. The Academy is not some old man in an office…

Early TV is a sad case as well, it's true! But some of it is out there, and both UCLA and the Library of Congress have huge television collections. Video is less stable than film, so there's a mountain of material slowly oozing away as archives rush to transfer their TV collections. Not super reassuring, I realize,…

Video game preservation is facing very similar rights issues to those faced by film preservation in its early days- the rights holders are reticent to let third parties copy their material, and copying is essential to the preservation process. Of course video games have the added problem of being born-digital…

The great news is that so many of the things you'd hope would be happening are happening. The Library of Congress currently has a project working directly with film collectors to borrow their unique and thought-to-be-lost prints to scan and then return to the owners. And the Academy Film Archive has been operating a…

A few places are all over it (see second half of this article). I'm not saying it isn't difficult, tedious work, but there are institutions (more than just the Library of Congress) committed to content housed on obsolete video formats. The guys in that doc… don't really need to be doing what they're doing. VHS is a…

As if to confirm our raised eyebrows over needless hubbub, Jim O'Heir has been tweeting from the set today as they shoot Rob Lowe's last scenes. So… no production halt.

I'm not defending NBC, but all this BS is mostly AV Club's fault for mis-reading a press release and now, rather than admit they missed something and freaked out about it later, they're sticking to their invented version of the story. We all know that not a lot of people watch Parks and Rec, and NBC has been very good…

That Jean Arthur scene is crazy delightful.