system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Movies and film from past decades still look fairly decent. Why do live sports from the same eras look so bad? Even highlights from just 10 years ago look greatly inferior to nowadays.
gpt
The type of recording media being used.

Film looked (and still looks) awesome, but it's really expensive and time consuming to work with. It also takes extra steps to take something shot on film and broadcast it on TV. So for sports, it just wasn't an option.

Recording to magnetic tape systems was much less expensive, and the signal that comes out of that kind of camera can pretty much go straight to broadcast, making live TV possible. But they didn't look as good, and duplicating a tape (which often had to happen for archival purposes) or amplifying the analog signal (necessary if you're broadcasting a national game to local affiliates) hurts the quality even further.

Modern broadcast systems are digital, and the reason for that is that digital format things do not degrade in quality when duplicated. Ten years ago the switchover process was still happening, analog TV was still a thing until 2009.