That’s the interesting thing about magnetic tape, it degausses and goes bad over time. Can’t imagine there’s many of these that have readable data — especially in the 480i format they were in.
They’re sealed, so that doesn’t really come up. They’re for collecting, not watching.
I figure many would stick in playback and break or at best get one pass as the oxide comes off.
No tape scraper for VHS, scraped many quad 2 inch reels.
I have a project/hobby digitizing old news, commercials, local ads, etc. I also collect tapes. It’s a really fun hobby and the tapes run fine. I have a few from the mid-1080’s that probably look and sound as good as the day they were recorded. On YouTube, if you look up a channel called Dave’s Archives, he digitizes tapes going back to the early 80s. Another channel, 80s commercial Vault has some digitized commercials going back to the late 70s. Tapes wear fast with heavy use though. I remember the countless times I watched E.T. as a kid and that tape didn’t look so good after a while.
My first thought too
One problem I identified with the non-Luddite population (nearly everyone but me)is the loss of information rather than the gain of it as the years pass.
If someone in music had let’s say 10 albums, there was a new cassette or cd of “Best of” “Greatest Hits” or similar title. The other songs and albums were never put on cd or streaming services. One good trend is a few places create “5 classic albums” etc of artists from the past including nearly forgotten ones. I now have the lost Electric Prunes albums that way (hope that doesn’t make everybody jealous)
Same is true of some old drive-in and grindhouse movies and the early silent films and theater newsreels. There is some belief Al Jolson performed for the Thomas Edison “Black Mariah” early film studio. No saved or duplicated film evidence, though.
Bob Dylan’s earliest performances included his trip to England to perform on stage in a play on TV but the policy of the network was to destroy all such videos in order to save storage room.
Newspapers, books, magazines: all in danger.
Amazingly in the library at U of Cal. Berkeley in the mid 1960s they set up a “deselection” plan (all do that to get rid of books today) to throw out useless books and make room. Categories that were destroyed outright as everyone knew they were never going to be needed later were women’s history and new age (astrology witchcraft, magic, shamans) and mind drugs. Funny.
I believe cures for diseases and the solution to some technological mysteries were lost when old scrolls or oral information was not preserved. The loss of the Library of Alexandria and others is in this category.