Maybe, but the original tapes have long been destroyed except for ones they knew they wanted to preserve for flashbacks years or decades down the road.

The fatal flaw here is that there just isn’t the enthusiast community to trade and copy tapes. If they’ve even survived in large numbers for 30-40 years, who would collect them? It’s how most ancient literature was long lost by the time of Renaissance attention to and preservation of antiquity.

There was an active wrestling-tape trading community of pay-per-views et cetera before there was a WWE Network, which seriously is a wrestling fan’s dream. I would have killed to have had it 25 years ago. Practically every Grateful Dead and jam band show ever has been preserved.

But soap operas? Not so much.