About a dozen people have written this week to ask me if the panels I'm doing at WonderCon will be recorded, streamed, put on You Tube, made available for sale, etc. The answer — and this goes for Comic-Con, about which folks ask the same — is generally a no. Some people who attend the panels bring along video or at least audio recording devices and if they ask and receive permission from all the panelists, I'm fine with it…sometimes.
Some don't ask but record anyway and I sometimes stop them for that reason. Some years ago, some outfit video-recorded a couple of my panels without asking and not only put them up on YouTube but added in an opening title that made it look like they'd produced the panels or something. I wrote them a note and while I never heard back from them, those videos soon were not to be found on YouTube. I also was once approached by a satellite radio company that asked permission to record and broadcast the audio from a few panels. I said yes if they'd give me a free subscription to their channel. They said yes, took down my contact info, recorded the panels, broadcast the panels…and never gave me my free subscription.
I'm of two minds on the subject. I think a lot of the panels are wonderful and they contain important history…but I also think that if they became routinely available online, an awful lot of the folks who now show up for them in person would not show up for them in person. As I've said before here, conventions do not program for empty seats. There are many cons that have zero interest in panels about the history of the comics because they've seen zero evidence that such programming has any impact on how many people buy badges. I think they're wrong but if more people attended panels that aren't basically infomercials for current product, there'd be more of them.
So basically, the answer is that most panels aren't recorded because no one is interested in expending the effort…and if someone was and they put them online, I'm not sure that would be a good thing.