My episode was pre-empted in my market due to breaking news. I called and asked for a copy, and after confirming I was on the episode, they agreed on the condition that I promised not to share it with others or upload it to the Internet and it was for personal home viewing only.
Unless there's somewhere they're making that episode available (and if there was, why wouldn't they have just told you to watch there?), they shouldn't object to you posting it on YouTube where they can monetize upon it. You're making them money. Why would they be offended by that? Where would be the benefit to Fremantle in further suppressing the sharing of the episode? I understand we're not talking huge figures of money and huge impact here, but if they're doing nothing else with it, why object to something that can earn them some cash?
Because folks like us could crowdfund a five-figure amount of money and request hundreds of episodes, and they'd have to seriously scale up the manpower working on it to fulfill those requests.
Much as I want to see the entire Barker era of The Price Is Right and the '70s and '80s syndicated versions, there's really only a few shows I'd consider ponying up cash to see. I highly doubt any attempted crowdfunding effort would ever see that much money collected, but even if Fremantle was able to be swamped by a crowdfunding effort to request the digitization of dozens of episodes, nobody said they had to move quickly on it.
I can see why they might not want to pull employees off of other duties or hire new employees to make digitizing their library a full-time job. Especially when the parent company wants to push people towards PlutoTV to fill that niche and they've already gone through a ton of effort to make that a thing.
For pushing towards Pluto TV, yes, Fremantle is probably not interested in releasing copies of that which they intend to run on the streaming platform, but considering how lethargic they have been at adding new episodes, one wonders if they've arrived at a point of, "That's good enough. We have enough rotation" and we won't be seeing the rest of the Barker era on the channel.
More to the point, it's the pre-season 11 episodes, which they have expressly indicated they are not running (outside of a few season 1 episodes), that Fremantle should not object to releasing to paying customers, the '70s syndicated version even more so. The tapes will not last forever and will either have to be digitized at some point if they are interested in preserving the episodes. The fact that there are fans willing to pay for the work on their behalf so that it is done at no cost to them and enabling them to then monetize on it is something they should not ignore.
One might say, "Perhaps they aren't charging the full cost and it does cost them something to do this", and that could be true, and if it is, I would say charge full cost. People will pay to see the episodes their friends and family appeared on, maybe with several people chipping in what they can to cover the cost; and if a loyal friend and true wants to pay whatever exorbitant price they would charge so we could finally see the Showcase tie from #008N (as an example), then they should be willing to accept such a request because in addition to whatever monetization they could make on a YouTube video, they also build rapport with the fanbase, who remain loyal consumers of your product for years to come. It's building goodwill, and that can be worth a lot on and off the balance sheet.
Of course, Fremantle could always throw a bone to the fanbase and share the highly-requested clips themselves. Again, it's building goodwill in addition to a pile of pennies from the YouTube clicks.
