I don't see why whoever owns the rights to these episodes can't give them an official upload on a streaming service or even just add them to YouTube on an official account.
Youtube would seem the logical home for original episodes of Corrie as the infrastructure exists.
ITV have dipped their toes into the YouTube thing with
Coronation Street Rewind, a channel where they’ve uploaded most of 1997. I figured they’d follow up with other years but they stopped adding new videos to the channel six months ago. They had a similar channel for
Emmerdale but they only uploaded some of 1994 and there’s been no new uploads in months there either.
As you mentioned
@Rove the infrastructure is there. 30+ years of
The Bold and the Beautiful is available on an official channel on YouTube and at one point, I think STV had all of
Take the High Road uploaded to it.
Could it be that residual payments or the threat of legal action is preventing ITV from showing classic episodes?
It’s a bit of a mystery, as sadly, a lot of the stars of the early years have passed away by now, so even if they were tied to paying residuals, there can’t be that many people left to pay.
About ten years ago, a local TV station in Birmingham (Big Centre TV) launched, with much fanfare about the fact that they’d bought 3,000 episodes of
Crossroads for a repeat run. Paul Henry (Benny) threatened legal action as they were concerned that actors would only receive something like €2 per repeat. The channel didn’t end up airing all 3,000 episodes but I don’t know if this was because of the threatened action or they just weren’t rating well.
Whenever Sons and Daughters is given another run here in Australia poor old Beryl (Leila Hayes) goes running to the media screaming, "Where are my residual payments?" My counter argument is no one could have predicted in 1982 we would someday be streaming.
Here’s a clip from 20 years ago, where they’re arguing about residuals in the context of TV reruns and DVD releases. God knows what they would make of streaming, as it’s my understanding that the majority of the 80’s Aussie soaps are streaming somewhere at present.