Regarding the "why preserve something if it's never going to be seen?" theme that's come and gone hereabouts:
Ultimately, it's because we don't KNOW that something is "never" going to be seen, and we can't predict what future people will value when they look back at the mass culture of a given period. Ownership changes, tastes and critical consensuses change, rights get cleared, new discoveries are made. When the only extant copies of something are junked, their non-availability becomes permanent for every succeeding generation.
About 30% of American silent features survive today in some form, including incompletes. In the middle years of the last century, many were discarded once their prints and negatives began to decay, because their owners usually felt that these movies had no further commercial potential and that there would never again be public demand to see them. Archivists and historians may have differed with them, but opinions won't bring those movies back.
In the late 1970s, 20th Century-Fox junked all of its three-strip Technicolor nitrate negatives. The color reversal intermediates made at the time were deemed adequate. Comes the era of DVD and especially Blu-ray, and the consequences of this preservation choice become more apparent when Fox's Technicolor output of the 1940s, while certainly watchable, lacks a certain something that modern scans of original three-strip negatives can reveal.
So that's why you keep things, even seeming trivia like a 65-episode game show. Retention and preservation practices are there (or should be) to benefit not only those now living, but for later generations as well.
