You can't reuse film, except to use the same footage in another production (which actually does happen a lot on TV and occasionally movies, sometimes you'll see the same stock footage being reused).
Videotape was often times erased and reused, but in this case it was more a matter of the restrictions placed on rerunning old TV programs placed on the BBC and other UK broadcasters by the technicians and actors unions, who presumably believed they'd be put out of work if the BBC and ITV were allowed to show too many reruns. And as I've said before, I don't think broadcasters realized that anything that was popular now could possibly continue to be popular decades later. And I certainly don't think that broadcasters expected home video to be what it turned out to be.
In the US, videotape was erased because broadcasters didn't think anyone would be interested in watching old episodes of The Tonight Show, game shows, or news broadcasts. Raw documentary footage was often times junked after the finished program was made. So for instance, if someone was doing a news thing about The Beatles, and let's say the filmed a few songs from the band performing wherever, and they only used 20 seconds of the footage in the finished broadcast, that 20 seconds is all that would have survived. And even then, a lot of times, the finished thing got junked too, because, guess what, at the time nobody knew anyone would want to watch it again.
And in Hollywood, they junked all the outtakes and bloopers and such. There's a lot of movies where scenes got cut for time, and then the footage was destroyed. I recall reading, for instance, there were a couple scenes that got cut from Thunderball, and all that exists now are still photos that were taken during the filming. Likewise, John Landis' original 3 hour version of The Blues Brothers no longer exists, because Universal apparently junked the original print, though an intermediary print that still had more footage than the theatrical release was eventually found and that was used to make the extended cut DVD.
And as I've said before, I don't think broadcasters (or anyone else who made such decisions) realized that anything that was popular now could possibly continue to be popular decades later. And I certainly don't think that anyone expected home video to be what it turned out to be.
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