And even if they don't have the sources, I can decompile the files and work from there.
Flash isn't the problem here, Is management ready to spend money on "modernizing" that content or not? Because it's likely that what these interactive apps were doing in 2001 couldn't be done with webtech at that time.
When I took a film exhibition class and we had a class on showing older films, I was surprised to hear that old analog 35mm film was considered the gold standard of archival formats for film preservationists.
The reason why digital formats, formats where the data is not liable to degrade over time, are not considered better is because “the formats keep changing”.
Of course you can encode your media in a lossless format, carefully choose open formats over bespoke proprietary formats, transcode as needed for the latest codecs, and if all else fails, play it in an emulator, which can run the proprietary codec.
Most people in the public, artistic professionals, and the journalists, are at the application level. They want to plug something in and have it just work. If you say you have to put thought into how you do something, it’s equivalent to saying it’s too hard and you basically can’t do it.
Besides, why should they hire you and me to play this media? They basically didn’t have this problem for decades with film/video. Then we, as technologists, come in with new wiz-bang toys that break compatibility every few years. If they’re being uncharitable, they see us as coming in with solutions to problems our industry imposed on them. I can see how technology could even be seen as racketeering. For journalists, technology has been bad for the business model and imposes new costs. Not a great look.
Right now, if you give me a random device, chances are the way I'll jailbreak it is through the random fork of WebKit installed on it.
Everything with mass distribution eventually becomes the vector.
DDS-1/2/3/4.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Data_Storage
LTO-6, LTO-7, LTO-8, LTO-9.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open
H.263, H.264, H.265, AV1. What's next?
As such, it sounds like the "lost" content the article discusses is lost in the sense that nobody is preserving it, not in the sense that something is preventing it from being preserved.