The “best” TV you could buy in 2005, television shows specifically appeared to be “high quality” or “clear” and now if you watch a show that is directly uploaded from the producers (circumventing continuous compression from file transfers) you can tell it’s out dated just based on the quality of the show (aside from cultural cues such as fashion, vehicles etc)
tl’dr : I was watching T.C.A.P w/ Chris Hansen on TV when it was aired, watching it now I can tell how old it is based on the quality of the recording.
In: 878
Everyone here is missing some key points.
Shows like To Catch a Predator is low effort content with no real perceived syndication options at the time. It was recorded on low quality tapes, and no real care was put into the quality.
As for then compared to now, HD LCDs and Plasma TVs were available, and HD was broadcast, CRTs were in the process of being phased out in 2005. So without you saying what you were watching on back then, and what you are watching on now, and what service you are watching it on now, we have to make some assumptions.
When you were watching it 15 years ago, it looked fine because a) you didn’t know any better and b) you were watch it at the native resolution, so no upscaling had to be done, and you didn’t know any better so it looked fine. And lastly c) It was also nearly 20 years ago so you are absolutely 100% not remembering it clearly. It didn’t look great, you just now think it did. A show like that is not watched for the picture quality. There’s no chance while you were watching it you thought to yourself wow the picture quality of To Catch a Predator is so amazing.
As for why it looks like ass now, video tapes degrade over time. Going back to my previous point, it was a low effort show with now syndication path, so they never took care of the tapes beyond storage, so when streaming became viable, they didn’t have a great source. They also wouldn’t have put any great care in transferring to digital, so no real manual processing would have been done to ensure a clean transfer because that costs money and TCAP is not a show that will bring in viewers, so it’s not worth the investment.
Friends is a great example of a show shot on video tape that has a fantastic transfer to BluRay because it was a massive hit from the start with syndication at the top of mind, so higher quality tapes were used, better recording equipment, better storage, and more care into the digital transfer.
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