If you’ve got 14 billion years, a theft takes a minute, then you need 53 recursion levels of binary search to find the moment of the theft.

That means OP assumed that it’d take 1 minute to decide whether at a certain still frame the theft had already occured or not, to compute the new offset to seek to, and the time it’d take to actually seek the tape to that point.

Not an unreasonable assumption, but a very conservative estimate. Assuming the footage is on an HDD and you’ve got an automated system for binary search, I’d actually assume it’d take 5 seconds for each step, meaning finding a 1min theft on 14 billion years of footage would take 5 minutes.