The Ads You Swear You Saw: Inside the VHS Hunters Recovering TV's Missing Minutes
A loose network of commercial archaeologists is rebuilding the ad breaks of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s from VHS tapes, station logs, and forgotten hard drives. Some spots survive only as third-generation fuzz. Others are still missing. The hunt says a lot about what we save and what we assume the internet has already saved for us.