Well, isn't that ironic. Sure, the content is "permanently available" in a technical sense, but it'll hinge on the permanent availability of playback devices deemed suitable by the DRM.
DRM is a scam on the law abiding consumer and the "Blu-ray Disc Association" is a cartel.
Honest question: do people still use PCs to watch BD movies? Have they ever? AFAIK the rare few people who still have a BD movie collections, use dedicated players or their consoles for that. Using a PC for that always seemed like masochism from a UX perspective so it was never popular.
To play the devil's advocate, I think it was too expensive for Intel to invest in patching the SGX IP block vulnerabilities, porting it to smaller nodes, and wasting valuable silicone die, just so the last 5 remaining people on the planet who still use a PC to watch BD movies can now do it from a brand new PC instead of using their existing ones.
So, ultimately this problem backtracks to the use of DRM and why that's bad, not on Intel who can't financially justify supporting such old & niche DRM IP moving forward.
But who watches TV or cable anymore? Not the young people.
BluRay had the dumb luck to be introduced right as the iPhone came out and redefined the consumer electronics landscape. PCs haven't been the forefront of how people entertain themselves since 2014ish unless you're a gamer with a gamer PC.
Me personally I'd rather just buy a $50 Bluray player from Walmart and be done with it.
You'd be able to make perfect-quality recordings from broadcast (remember when timeshifting was valuable?) and the built-in EPG data would reduce the need for some clumsy external data source.
But it felt like we never transitioned smoothly. I can recall the Media Centre stuff for Windows Vista being pretty clunky.
I suspect part of it was that people were under-appreciating the synergy. I liked TV cards for "I can watch in a 20cm window while doing other stuff" but all the momentum was going into terrible 10-foot interfaces that worked best with a remote control.
But then HD content arrived with bitrates too high for that hardware and everything splintered and got confusing and which Mac mini was beefy enough to play 1080p @ 30fps and which downloads were “HD” but not so hd that you couldn’t play them …
It never got back to the elegance of a modded Xbox and sd content …
And unfortunately external optical drives are usually of terrible quality :-/
Most of the free/trial stuff I used had subpar menu support (some would only even play the longest playlist). The other issue was my intent was to rip so it was useful to reference playlist numbering, and not all players made it accessible.
Sometimes I just resort to using a physical player.
It's possible to use VLC. You just have to download two files to decrypt the Blu-rays. -> https://vlc-bluray.whoknowsmy.name
The old school file sharing internet is alive and well if you know where to look for it