Well, the studios themselves have the rights, so why they don't digitize it is strange to me. Well, the big ones I can see, obviously they don't see enough $ in it. But small, national ones like the BRT in BE or something, they have a duty to the tax payer (who pays to make these shows happen) even to do this in my eyes.

I would pay for 'series and movies' nobody wants to see and so would many others, so if not only for posterity, then do it for some profit. I wouldn't sign up for some modern subscription, but if these were included I would. It's just a matter of being complete.

But yes, you are right, the copyright issue sucks; no-one cares about these series/movies, so why not remove the (c).

It seems a bit of a stretch to blame copyright for this.

People upload content for which they don't own the copyright all the time.

In this case, the people with the videos just don't want to go through the effort of digitizing and uploading. Even if the studios said, "All of our old stuff is public domain," it wouldn't change anything.

I think it would. If the studios would say that, they could have the local film academy students in to digitize; they like that and they can study stuff which hardly anyone saw before. They did that in the Film museum in Amsterdam and that worked fine. So yes that would work.