^Well, a better comparison might be the archiving policies of the BBC in the 1970s, which is why a bunch of old episodes of
Doctor Who, The Avengers, & other shows of that era no longer exist. With
Doctor Who, even the episodes that do still exist, none of the original master tapes from the 1st 8 seasons exist anymore. All we have now are black & white film prints shot with a telecine machine, fan made off-air color video recordings, and some high quality American tapes that still need to be back-converted from NTSC back into PAL (which still yielded some pretty poor converted images until a few years ago when they were finally able to use computers to adjust the color and diminish the extra motion-blur).