From a practical perspective I feel like we are right back in the 1990s in terms of how easy it is for me to obtain access to movies I want to watch.
The big streaming players just seem to get worse every day - it's probably not an exaggeration that 80% of movies I search for simply aren't available, at all.
Especially classics, double especially foreign. You just can't get them. But there's no video stores any more, and I'm not paying $30+ to order a physical disk from another country, wait a week, only to watch it once and put it in a pile to rot.
So I find myself, just like I did in the '90s, downloading and playing them off a computer. And saying the same things to anyone who'll listen - I'd pay to watch this, but no-one will sell it to me for a reasonable price, so I'll just pirate it and enjoy it with a clear conscience.
I downloaded movies in the late 90s on a 56k modem. The movies were generally compressed to fit on one or two writable CDs, you can download 700MB easily overnight (about 3.5 hours if your ISP is good). The quality was much worse than what we're used to now though.
I was lucky to have symmetric 512KB/sec from about 1997 on, but even before that the most dedicated sort of nerd could definitely download ~700MB movies over 56K with some effort..
Are you searching subscription streaming services or digital movie rental/purchase services?
You can basically find any movie for rent/purchase on Apple TV Store (formerly iTunes Movies) or Vudu or whatever other similar service you want to choose from. They’re just not included with your Netflix/Max/Hulu subscription, which are the modern equivalent to basic cable. They may be on streaming services but only included on a rotating basis.
This “no one will sell it to me for a reasonable price” thing is kind of BS. You’re just not willing to pay at all, or you’re only willing to pay basic cable price for access to a catalog with a size that doesn’t fit that price.
It’s fitting then that the rental and physical media market collapsing now stops entire genres of movies from being made. As an example, people don’t rent comedies anymore, so they don’t get made and put into theaters.
> You can basically find any movie for rent/purchase on Apple TV Store (formerly iTunes Movies) or Vudu
If you look closely at film ownership and licensing, you'll know why this is not true.
The production gold standard for content + commentary is Criterion Collection, who now have their own streaming service in addition to their blu-rays for restored films.
Everything else is an unpredictable puzzle palace of variable quality, license availability windows, free-with-ads, digital codes or exclusivity when a studio (e.g. MGM, Paramount) is bought/sold by a streaming service. Vudu has a good service where you can get an HD digital copy for $2 if you own the bluray. Max 100 titles/year. But as usual, the selection of films for "Disc to Digital" is a random output of license quagmires.
I will not rent a movie, ever. If I buy it I should own it. They only want us to stream the content (when it's available) from them, and they looove removing the small amount of interesting content they have over time.
The current system does not work for consumers, and people pirating media is a result of that. They need to get their shit together, not us.
Remember to keep a local offline mirror of your favorite content from ripped physical media, online archives and aggregators. Rotate every 5 years to larger, newer drives that can store higher-resolution versions. Nothing is infallible, including archive.org, infocon.org, flickr, github/gitlab/sourceforge, YT/peertube/rumble, kiwix/stackoverflow/wikipedia and long-tail niche websites.
Alas, I have external drives from 2015, 2010, etc. that I've never filled up completely. Should I consolidate on a newer one and junk them? Some I haven't accessed in years.
It's good to periodically consolidate onto a new mirrored pair of reputable spinning rust with ZFS or another filesystem that can automatically monitor for bitrot, even if you keep the old ones around (drive reliability economics varied over time as vendors consolidated).
Gives opportunity for sorting archives into tiers of importance based on current perspective. Content with highest ratio of importance/size can be stored on enterprise-grade SSD.
The best motivation for keeping healthy archives is to use them :) It's worth finding offline OSS/paid software to help categorize/search/browse archives. Upcoming offline LLMs should also help.
Tailscale on Apple TV (and other devices) can be an exit node for remote streaming access to archives on home networks.
Regardless of the nostalgia factor of old media (whose value is overstated, imo), the only practical alternative these days is not owning any media at all. So when no single streaming service pays the license to stream The Matrix, the film will virtually cease to exist. Fast forward a few hundred years of bit rot, and there's a nonzero chance that the film is lost to time. Think of all the countless valuable film, music, etc that didn't have the acclaim of The Matrix. Gone sooner, and more prolifically.
I remember in the 90's the promise of the Internet was that it would be a resilient repository of all human knowledge and cultural artifacts. I remember people pointing out that the Internet was designed to survive even a nuclear war, so tragedies like the loss of the Library of Alexandria would never happen again.
Instead, we got link rot, abandonware IP, and lots of memes.
I wonder who was promising that. It's a lot more like a postal system where you can mail huge volumes of data instantly and for almost no charge, but mailing your neighbor or friend is incredibly difficult compared to mailing a company and getting a reply.
Stuff definitely falls through the cracks.
Even the 20-something-year-old promise of Google to "index the world's information" has failed pathetically. I frequently can't find things I'm looking for, because all I have left in my head is a fingerprint of "I'll know it when I see it" and maybe a couple odd keywords that aren't enough to pull any signal out of the noise.
In one case I got ChatGPT to help me find a book I'd been missing for years because the generic keywords like "magic staff", "tree", "volcano crater" returned jack shit on common search engines. (It was "The Ancient One" by T. A. Barron, if anyone else is stuck looking for it too)
In another case I found a book on Kagi.
The Library of Babel is a much closer analogy. Everything _might_ be in there, but you probably aren't gonna find anything worthwhile. lol.
The internet was originally designed to be robust in the face of nuclear war, but that meant packets could be routed over the network even when individual point to point connections were lost.
I remember seeing an ad for whose premise was a cheap hotel where "we have every movie ever made on our TVs".
That was one promise of the streaming future... but there was never an understanding that the internet was permanent.
Even during the initial fad of "everyone needs their own homepage" before geocities, most pages were dead or broken or obsolete in a few months.
A large distributed redundant archive of data would be useful... probably with some mechanism where you can donate resources to preserve the data you like without having to support the stuff you don't care about (because resources are finite.)
> the only practical alternative these days is not owning any media at all
This is the approach I've taken. Shelves of records, DVDs, tapes, CDs... all gathering dust and taking up space. Honestly the only music I listen to is a classic rock radio station when I'm driving my car. Whatever they play is what I listen to. It's just not that important to me any more. Movies, music, they are just time-fillers. They are something to do when there's nothing to do. When I was 20 I felt differently.
thankfully all the pirates of the golden age of physical media and their ancestors who have meticulously tranferred the inherited data to the newest forms of storage have kept countless backups and the legend of neo will live on for years to come
I think most of the stuff from the era of physical media will survive if cared for. So content pre-2010s will probably be found by archeologists some day, and they will ponder why we stopped making films and TV shows all of a sudden.
My collection of DVDs and CDs is still flawless after many decades. I have some VHS approaching 40-50 years (Although it’s slowly degrading).
There are a lot of things preserved in the library of congress which remain inaccessible to most people. It's better than having works vanish entirely, but our culture is still poorer and shrinking as a result.
What happens to those private collections when those data hoarders die though? As the data hoarders die off the private collections will too as hard drives fail and surviving family members, less passionate about preservation, inherit media and servers they don't know what to do with, much of which will just end up in the trash.
If given enough warning about my own death I might be tempted to pay for a couple seedboxes on bulletproof servers and just hope the files stay up as long as possible and find many new homes before the money runs out. The RIAA/MPA can't come after you once you're dead.
The data hoarders are just a greedy sometimes. I can across a story of some lost media the other day, that supposedly had at least one physical copy remain, but no copies would be made, so that the holder could jack the price up on ebay.
Once we've amassed a volume of artistic media so large that it would take hundreds of human lifetimes to make use of, what is the point?
Movies like the matrix have already had an eternal effect on the Zeitgeist of a generation, forever altering human culture in some small way, at the very least. Why worry about it still being on a drive somewhere in 200 years?
> Once we've amassed a volume of artistic media so large that it would take hundreds of human lifetimes to make use of, what is the point?
By that logic we should stop creating music or writing books right now. What's the point? There are already enough of both that no one could ever have enough years of life to read/hear it all.
Obviously there are a lot of very good reason to keep creating new things, and a lot of good reasons to preserve the old ones, not the least of which is that old works create the inspiration and material for new ones. A good song or a good story is timeless and can be enjoyed no matter many years have passed since it was created.
Media says a lot of about our culture and history. It shows how art has evolved and can provide a lot of education and wisdom that can get lost when fads and trends steal the spotlight for a long time, but when older works are still around to be studied and enjoyed they can be rediscovered.
Interesting mixing up of "an object" worth collecting and "the documents" such as director interviews, deleted scenes, commentaries, etc - also worth collecting but in what sense? I mean the documents are the same if they are digitally on blu-ray, DVD, disk drive or cloud (okay, not cloud), and they do take effort to round up. All the more so that if you are going to do so, you are not going to limit yourself to what's on the approved DVD, you will also hunt more obscure stuff.
Meanwhile, "object" editions are highly suspect from a collecting point of view since generated by a marketing machine. And the documents are often very hard to get to because ignored by the online platforms. The opinions reported are interesting but what a mess for now.
Every DVD I've ever owned I have ripped to a server. If I paid money for it, I have ripped it somehow. The concept of licensing and never owning the product you paid for must go. Especially video games.
Maybe it's about time to state a thing, means to store and retrieve information do change, as have done ever since, if we want to preserve information we need to transfer it a step at a time from "the old" to "the new" mean, when both are well known and eventual hw needed to work with both version do exists and it's known and spread.
Other activities are pointless, might work for a little time, for a small set of information but not on scale. To preserve heritage we simply should keep data fresh.
This is true also for books. Adding things like sprayed edges, pretty hardcovers, and higher quality materials turns the items into more collectibles, things to show off to friends or decorate a home with instead of hide away.
Readit News
The big streaming players just seem to get worse every day - it's probably not an exaggeration that 80% of movies I search for simply aren't available, at all. Especially classics, double especially foreign. You just can't get them. But there's no video stores any more, and I'm not paying $30+ to order a physical disk from another country, wait a week, only to watch it once and put it in a pile to rot.
So I find myself, just like I did in the '90s, downloading and playing them off a computer. And saying the same things to anyone who'll listen - I'd pay to watch this, but no-one will sell it to me for a reasonable price, so I'll just pirate it and enjoy it with a clear conscience.
You can basically find any movie for rent/purchase on Apple TV Store (formerly iTunes Movies) or Vudu or whatever other similar service you want to choose from. They’re just not included with your Netflix/Max/Hulu subscription, which are the modern equivalent to basic cable. They may be on streaming services but only included on a rotating basis.
This “no one will sell it to me for a reasonable price” thing is kind of BS. You’re just not willing to pay at all, or you’re only willing to pay basic cable price for access to a catalog with a size that doesn’t fit that price.
It’s fitting then that the rental and physical media market collapsing now stops entire genres of movies from being made. As an example, people don’t rent comedies anymore, so they don’t get made and put into theaters.
What an odd spin.
People don't rent comedies anymore because there are no comedies made anymore for you to rent.
And nobody's making comedies anymore because present day people are too easily offended by everything and raise hell on Twitter out of every joke.
If you look closely at film ownership and licensing, you'll know why this is not true.
The production gold standard for content + commentary is Criterion Collection, who now have their own streaming service in addition to their blu-rays for restored films.
Everything else is an unpredictable puzzle palace of variable quality, license availability windows, free-with-ads, digital codes or exclusivity when a studio (e.g. MGM, Paramount) is bought/sold by a streaming service. Vudu has a good service where you can get an HD digital copy for $2 if you own the bluray. Max 100 titles/year. But as usual, the selection of films for "Disc to Digital" is a random output of license quagmires.
The current system does not work for consumers, and people pirating media is a result of that. They need to get their shit together, not us.
Meanwhile I'm more than happy to pay for Spotify.
Gives opportunity for sorting archives into tiers of importance based on current perspective. Content with highest ratio of importance/size can be stored on enterprise-grade SSD.
The best motivation for keeping healthy archives is to use them :) It's worth finding offline OSS/paid software to help categorize/search/browse archives. Upcoming offline LLMs should also help.
Tailscale on Apple TV (and other devices) can be an exit node for remote streaming access to archives on home networks.
Instead, we got link rot, abandonware IP, and lots of memes.
Stuff definitely falls through the cracks.
Even the 20-something-year-old promise of Google to "index the world's information" has failed pathetically. I frequently can't find things I'm looking for, because all I have left in my head is a fingerprint of "I'll know it when I see it" and maybe a couple odd keywords that aren't enough to pull any signal out of the noise.
In one case I got ChatGPT to help me find a book I'd been missing for years because the generic keywords like "magic staff", "tree", "volcano crater" returned jack shit on common search engines. (It was "The Ancient One" by T. A. Barron, if anyone else is stuck looking for it too)
In another case I found a book on Kagi.
The Library of Babel is a much closer analogy. Everything _might_ be in there, but you probably aren't gonna find anything worthwhile. lol.
I remember seeing an ad for whose premise was a cheap hotel where "we have every movie ever made on our TVs".
That was one promise of the streaming future... but there was never an understanding that the internet was permanent.
Even during the initial fad of "everyone needs their own homepage" before geocities, most pages were dead or broken or obsolete in a few months.
A large distributed redundant archive of data would be useful... probably with some mechanism where you can donate resources to preserve the data you like without having to support the stuff you don't care about (because resources are finite.)
This is the approach I've taken. Shelves of records, DVDs, tapes, CDs... all gathering dust and taking up space. Honestly the only music I listen to is a classic rock radio station when I'm driving my car. Whatever they play is what I listen to. It's just not that important to me any more. Movies, music, they are just time-fillers. They are something to do when there's nothing to do. When I was 20 I felt differently.
My collection of DVDs and CDs is still flawless after many decades. I have some VHS approaching 40-50 years (Although it’s slowly degrading).
E.g. Existenz and Strange Days
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existenz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Days_(film)
If given enough warning about my own death I might be tempted to pay for a couple seedboxes on bulletproof servers and just hope the files stay up as long as possible and find many new homes before the money runs out. The RIAA/MPA can't come after you once you're dead.
Movies like the matrix have already had an eternal effect on the Zeitgeist of a generation, forever altering human culture in some small way, at the very least. Why worry about it still being on a drive somewhere in 200 years?
Movies like The Matrix don't materialize out of thin air.
They are the cultural and creative descendants of countless prior art pieces.
There's a reason why film creators publish commentary about their production process.
To neglect history is to starve the future.
There are a bunch of movies for every decade that are still "must see" just for the impact they had on media.
By that logic we should stop creating music or writing books right now. What's the point? There are already enough of both that no one could ever have enough years of life to read/hear it all.
Obviously there are a lot of very good reason to keep creating new things, and a lot of good reasons to preserve the old ones, not the least of which is that old works create the inspiration and material for new ones. A good song or a good story is timeless and can be enjoyed no matter many years have passed since it was created.
Media says a lot of about our culture and history. It shows how art has evolved and can provide a lot of education and wisdom that can get lost when fads and trends steal the spotlight for a long time, but when older works are still around to be studied and enjoyed they can be rediscovered.
There's billions of people and they all like different things.
Meanwhile, "object" editions are highly suspect from a collecting point of view since generated by a marketing machine. And the documents are often very hard to get to because ignored by the online platforms. The opinions reported are interesting but what a mess for now.
Other activities are pointless, might work for a little time, for a small set of information but not on scale. To preserve heritage we simply should keep data fresh.
When Netflix wrecked their dvd business, that was a sure sign as well.