It costs lots of money to digitize and host the old stuff. And the non-profit organization doesn't lend itself well to selling access - it takes time and effort (read "money") to research with the lawyers whether "selling" or "membership fees" or whatever other business model is legally acceptable under the organization's structure.
But since new content is shot in digital, and edited digitally, it's a minor step to convert for streaming and also broadcast so they just stick to that.
Torrent sites seem to manage it. I don't think it's about cost of digitizing but it certainly has to do with old business model having trouble to adapt.
FWIW a lot of work DOES go into making high-quality releases, running infra, writing tracker code and maintaining high quality, even on torrent sites. Sure, a dedicated small team of passionate individuals can do it in their free time, but it's still work. Also, hosting a torrent file is pretty different from running a streaming service, even if there are more or less turn-key video streaming pipelines out there these days (e.g. https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/streaming/ / https://www.ooyala.com/ / https://www.anvato.com/ / https://streamspot.com/ depending on what you're trying to do , live vs hosted content vs subscription vs something more custom )
I think hosting could be solved somewhat easily depending on how much control PBS actually has of their programming. They could go peer to peer, which makes total sense for a public good.
Digitization costs are still an issue, of course. I wonder if they just have a tape archive or if there’s some internal effort to digitize everything already (maybe cheaper in the long run than storing a huge quantity of tape?)
It’s a bit annoying though when people complain about cutting federal funding for PBS under the guise of “saving Big Bird,” yet the taxpayer doesn’t have access to the fruits of those tax dollars. Similar to publicly funded research being hidden behind paywalls. If PBS has the money (some from taxes) to make the programming, they should have enough to provide the content for free either via their own streaming services or via commercial services.
They do have a free streaming service and they do stream stuff through YouTube. The availability of a show will depend on the licensing restrictions they have from the content producers though. It's the member stations that are the ones who are producing all of the content (or licensing it from other broadcasters (e.g. BBC) and production houses (e.g. Ken Burns).
If they aren't legally obliged to purchase "broadcasting right" from "members", they can always stop doing so.
If they ARE legally obliged (or forced by corporate mob, depending on your preferences) to engage in the rent-seeking, their budget founding should be permanently set to zero.
So maybe we should require it to be public domain? We complain about the government using proprietary software like Microsoft Windows so why not complain about royalties and copyright licensing agreements?
The whole industry makes no sense to me.
It makes no sense to be that Netflix doesn't own full, unrestricted rights to house of cards without paying anyone anything extra after the work is completed (residual).
But since new content is shot in digital, and edited digitally, it's a minor step to convert for streaming and also broadcast so they just stick to that.