Television and radio commercials in general can sometimes be pretty hard to find once they stop airing, since there's no guarantee that anybody will think to record them and upload them online. Averted if the ad is available on iSpot or Adland, since most nationally run ads nowadays on American TV are usually posted on either site.
Not every hhgregg commercial is easy to find online. Even the compilation linked on its trope page doesn't contain all of them.
The online ads for the Indian antivirus software Protegent became wildly memetic after a Vinesauce stream featured them. Unistal, the creators of Protegent, eventually took down their original uploads of the ads, forcing anybody who still wants to see them to watch them through unauthorized reuploads.
Full episodes of news programs in general are extremely hard to find after they stop airing for a few weeks, since the news focuses on promoting stories that are surprise surprise "new" and ignores stuff that is not relevant now.
Art
Agrippa (a book of the dead) was penned by famed cyberpunk novelist William Gibson, illustrated by Dennis Ashbaugh and published by Kevin Begos Jr., the "Art" here consists of a book printed with quick fading ink and self-destructing floppy that accompany the deluxe version of the book, as well as a one-time-only live public reading. The only exceptions are:
A few copies of the book were printed with regular ink; these copies were sent to the Library of Congress as well as selected public libraries and museums, and are publicly accessible.
In one of the earliest recorded instances of this trope and piracy via the Internet: a group of students managed to convince the radio station that they're documentarians and made a full video tape of the teleprompter, which is in fact a MacBook running a copy of said self-destructing floppy. A complete transcription of the poem appeared on the underground BBS MindVox the next day.
The poem is permanently available (for now) on William Gibson's website.
For a lot of works of video art, this trope is a way of life. As many of them are intended to be sold off as fine art or in galleries, a lot of them have have extremely limited releases, and many of them run afoul of copyright. Here are a few notable examples:
Matthew Barney's 1994-2002 film series The Cremaster Cycle, loosely inspired by the creation of sexual characteristics in a human fetus note Or as Dan Olson famously explained in a negative review of the cycle, "it's about balls!" was originally intended to be played at galleries alongside specially defined sculptures, but as the series grew more and more famous he struck a deal with Palm Pictures to have it play in arthouse and repertory theaters. Aside from an extremely limited box set release of the six films aimed at the art market, and a single release of a 31-minute excerpt of the famous "The Order" scene from the third film (which was actually the last to be filmed and released), Barney has refused to let the film be released on mass market home video because he feels that it would make the film less special. That hasn't stopped bootlegged copies of varying quality from appearing all across the internet: a BuzzFeed article about rare works of art and literature that have surfaced on torrenting sites said that a complete, high quality rip of the box set was "the holy grail of film piracy".
For more practical reasons, you'll probably never get a copy of Christian Marclay's The Clock, a 24 hour supercut of film scenes featuring clocks that acts as an actual real time clock. As per the nature of the project (which uses clips from everything from High Noon to The 40-Year-Old Virgin to The Stranger without the permission of the copyright holders), the film is technically a work of piracy, which is why when it plays at art museums it's usually included as part of the general admission and not as a separate ticket. Only six copies were made, all but one was sold to various art museums (the last one was sold to New York Mets owner Steve Cohen) on the condition that only one museum was allowed to screen it at a time. Unlike the above mentioned Cremaster, it seems that the Internet has chosen to respect Marclay's wishes and not try and steal any of the copies of his work...but they have created a guide as to which film clips he used in the work, which can be found at the dedicated Wiki
While studying as an undergrad at the Philadelphia College of Art and Design in the late 60's, Joe Dante created The Movie Orgy, one of the most important early examples of modern mash-ups and super cut videos. Running at seven hours long, it was an evolving compilation of various bits of nostalgic baby boomer kitsch from Dante's youth, ranging from clips of sci-fi B-movies such as Teenagers from Outer Space to scenes from children's TV to old commercials to newsreel footage of A-bomb tests. Much like The Clock, Dante undercut the copyright restrictions by making all theater showings free, playing arthouse theaters and college campuses thanks to a generous sponsorship from Schlitz beer. While the film still tours the repertory circuit (thanks to a recent restoration from the American Genre Film Archive), chances of a home video release are slim.
South Korean-born artist Nam June Paik, the father of video art (and the man who coined the phrase "information superhighway"), made two "installations" that were broadcasted live on TV via satellite: Good Morning Mr. Orwell and Bye Bye Kipling. The former, a collaboration between PBS affiliate WNET in New York with the Centre Pompidou in Paris, was made to commemorate New Year's Day of 1984 and was a rebuttal/celebration of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and the dystopian vision of the future. It featured an All-Star Cast, including George Plimpton (who hosted), Allen Ginsberg (who recired poetry), John Cage (who did the score), and Oingo Boingo (who performed their song "Wake Up (It's 1984)"), among others. The latter, which linked New York, Seoul, and Tokyo, was a celebration of the cultural links between America and East Asia, lampooning Kipling's famous statement that "East is East, West is West, and neither the twain shall meet". It featured Lou Reed, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Dick Cavett as host, among others. Neither of these shows are on home video: edited versions of them sometimes play in galleries, but your best bet to see the whole thing is to check the Internet Archive.
The majority of the 1980's series can be found online, but there are quite a few episodes that weren't uploaded.
Out of the few episodes of the modern series that are part of the original English dub (they made another, different one afterwards), even fewer have surfaced online.
Noonbory and the Super 7 did get a couple of DVD releases, but they only contain a few episodes each, and the combined episode count does not amount to all 26 episodes of the show. However, in the spring of 2021, the entire series was uploaded to YouTube in both English and Korean.
Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: Subverted; the official YouTube upload of the HD widescreen remastered version of Smart Dodging episode 34 was set private for currently no known reasons.
Disney licensed the series to Shout! Factory to release five DVD compilations. While they all contain the first season in its entirety, only a few second season segments were released on the fifth compilation, leaving the rest of the season in limbo. This is also the only way you can watch the series now, meaning that the high-definition versions have only ever been seen on television. The rest of the series is scattered online.
This also seems to be the case with the original animated shorts, as the Vooz website doesn't seem to be accessible to US servers. Adding to this, because of Adobe discontinuing Shockwave Flash and the lack of site updates, they don't seem available on the site "Pucca Club" either (if you can get "Pucca club" to work). To watch the shorts one would have to be looking really hard for any mirrors.
There are two dubs of Simple Samosa for each language it's aired in (Hindi, English, Tamil, and Telugu), with one version only covering the first season and a later version covering it and Season 2, both with noticeable differences between each other that are mostly evident in the dialogue. The original dubs of Season 1 became completely replaced by the ones produced later for television airings, and Disney+ Hotstar only carries the later dubs, meaning the original audio tracks are only accessible via fan recordings.
Chinese-animated Lilo & StitchSpin-OffStitch & Ai had twelve of its thirteen episodes available on DisneyNow at the beginning of December 2018, but they were later taken down by June the following year. A couple YouTube channels, one of them dedicated to the show, uploaded Southeast Asian Disney Channel recordings of all thirteen episodes to the site, but all except the tenth and twelfth episodes ("Dream On" and "Brothers") were later globally blocked. However, a Vimeo channel dedicated to Chinese movies and shows uploaded all the episodes on that site, and those are still extant as of August 2022. They are a little harder to find, though, since the uploads on there use the Chinese titles instead, despite said uploads being the English-language versions. Additionally, users in certain countries can't watch them without a Vimeo account because the uploader never gave them content ratings.
Yamucha's-Kung Fu Academy: The original fifteen web shorts from 2004 don't appear to be accessible anymore, that as of 2019 the videos on the Sina (the first host) and QQ (which added them in 2011) websites aren't working anymore.
Instructional Media
Hikuta: The Art of Controlled Violence, based on the book of the same name by Dok Lee (real name Lee Crull). In this video, Dok (which according to Crull stands for "Defender of Kings") Lee demonstrates the techniques of Hikuta, an allegedly ancient martial art dating back to the bodyguards of the Egyptian Pharaohs. Initially, it was available by mail order on VHS during the early 1990s if you knew where to look for it (mostly from ads in magazines such as Black Belt and Soldier of Fortune). Now, it is not known who owns the rights to the video since Dok Lee's death in 2000 and given the low budget, non professional quality nature of such productions (a regular instance in the martial arts community), it's not even certain if workable quality masters of the tape still exist.
Pretty much 99.99% of all Instructional videos of the 80s-2000s have never been re released, or are lost. Websites like While Everything Is Terrible! and found footage festivals have persevered a-lot of them, there are many still lost.
Manhua
Little Cherry: Much of the manhua strips and stories dating from its inception in 1998 to 2008 had been printed in volumes, but the ones drawn since mid-2008 have often been published only in its parent company's Childhood Comics magazine, where some older issues are difficult to come by.
Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf manhua: The websites that hosted early manhua strips went down and CPE didn't put all of the manhua strips on their app, making some early strips hard to find.
Spoken word media
The LP recordings of The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy 1978 are long out-of-print and it's not clear who owns the rights, so they're likely to remain that way. Many fans reckon the performances and pacing, especially on the first album, are better than the original radio series.
From the late '40s through the mid '50s, Capitol released a series of children's records with original Looney Tunes stories, featuring Mel Blanc and Arthur Q. Bryan themselves voicing the characters (mind you, this was before Warner Bros. had a record label). All of them went out of print when Capitol's rights to the franchise ended, and they've never seen any reissue. While they're not too difficult to track down on eBay, getting a good, clean copy will cost you a pretty penny. It doesn't help that the rights to them all are split up between Universal Music (the recordings, and present owner of Capitol) and Warner Bros. (the characters themselves).
Comedian Jerry Sadowitz has never released DVDs of his shows. His famous Total Abuse Show was last released on VHS and has gone out of print. In fact, he is notorious for hastily removing any online footage of him. His short-lived television series The Pall Bearer's Revue also applied. Due to the sheer amount of complaints it received, it's unlikely to ever be shown again.
I don’t want people looking at me on a DVD for the first time – and there are loads of people who haven’t seen me – and thinking: "Oh, he’s a bit like Frankie Boyle. Oh, he’s a bit like Ricky Gervais, he’s a bit like Jimmy Carr or Chubby Brown. I’ve heard Doug Stanhope do that..." So I don’t want people saying that about me.
Theatre
Many Live on Stage! and On Ice shows never see home media releases, with a few exceptions:
Most of the Barney & Friends live shows have seen home video releases, while Barney Live In Concert! Birthday Bash is available on YouTube.
VeggieTales Live! Sing Yourself Silly, unlike most shows based on the franchise, actually got released to DVD.
The Wizard of Oz On Ice was released to VHS after airing on CBS.
Averted in Japan, where it's common for shows of this type to get home media releases, as is the case with several live shows based on NHK children's shows and the Pretty Cure musical shows. In a similar vein, the United Kingdom had a similar trend of releasing live shows to home video from the 90's to the early 2000's, but this has since stopped.
Pokémon Live!'s soundtrack CD had a very limited release and is impossible to find anywhere to buy. The show itself was supposed to get a home video release, but it never materialized.
Trading show videos (also known as "footwear") are common among Broadway fans since so few shows have ever seen an official VHS/DVD release. Reasons for trading include collecting everything a certain performer has been in and checking out and comparing revival, regional, touring, and/or international productions of shows.
Vanity plates in general can get hit very hard with this. A notorious practice done by distributors is "plastering"—the practice of replacing the original logo used on a print of a film or episodes of television series with newer or more modern logos. Whereas some logos get lucky and are preserved on re-distributed prints (usually if it's handled by the same studio), any logos on films / television series that end up having their rights given to a new owner are virtually guaranteed to have this happen to them in newer re-releases; upon which people will have to hunt for older prints/releases to see the original logo in question. For enthusiasts of vanity plates, these events can be especially painful as logos can sometimes get all sorts of neat changes over the years of their use, varying from slight subtle changes (intentional or otherwise) that can only be spotted on select examples, to having entire logo jokes that perfectly fit the attached film/television show in question. Not helping matters is that vanity plates from older films / television shows are also subject to film deterioration, so they don't look or sound quite as good as they were originally intended; or can end up being edited out for running time or squeezed down to a fraction of its size if attached to a show under syndication or attached to a "television network" cut of a film, so you can't even get a good look at the vanity plate in question (if you even see it at all).
The Audiovisual Identity Database note formerly known as the Closing Logos Group Wiki, a wiki site for vanity plates, acknowledges logo preservation/circulation through an "Availability" section for logo descriptions, which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Logos are given documentation on the films/television shows/etc. they appear on (and if they appear on later releases/prints of those properties), which are then used to rank logos on a scale of said availability; ranging from "very common" (logos that are widely used by the distributor, especially for plastering purposes) to "extinct/near extinction" (logos that can be found on ancient prints/releases, but have otherwise been replaced by other logos and/or are impossible to find).
Some logos were/are widely hated by enthusiasts for their omnipresence by way of plastering older logos. The Columbia/Tri-Star Television "Boxes of Boredom" (plastered over older Screen Gems and Columbia TV logos), the Sony Pictures Television "Bars of Boredom" (plastered over the same logos as the "Boxes of Boredom" and, ironically, the "Boxes of Boredom" themselves), and the 20th Television logo (plastered over older 20th Century Fox Television and MTM Enterprises logos) are but a few infamous examples. Warner Bros.loves doing this. See anything made by Lorimar.
Sometimes they're lost not because of plastering, but simply due to the fact that no recordings or snapshots of it were made when the logos were shown. Take for example, the PolyGram Television logo from 1981: due to the division's obscurity during it's original run, the logo's existence couldn't be confirmed until it was discovered decades after the fact, on a film that had fallen into the public domain. In home video cases, it might simply be due to no copies of that release being found as of yet. The Audiovisual Identity Database's aforementioned "Availability" section also acknowledges this status; with such logos being listed as "unknown."
Many older TV idents were literally kept by circulating tapes and are now only accessible for that reason. The British organisation Transdiffusion started life in the 1960s as essentially a postal swap system for off-air recordings of television presentation between schoolchildren who were interested in the subject, and now consists of an extensive archive of such ephemera.
Screenplays, play scripts
Despite being developed into the Ghostbusters (1984) film we all know today; the original Ghost-Smashers script Dan Aykroyd wrote, which is completely different to the film that was produced, is lost to time. Good luck finding it. All we got is a Ghostbusters final shooting script.
Eugene O'Neill requested to his wife that any of his unfinished works be destroyed before his death in 1953. Only one of them survived (in draft form anyways).
Streaming services
Any show or movie, that is exclusive to the streaming service, if becomes unavailable , would be impossible to find legally, since they are kept only for the service in question.
