> younger generations do not watch older content

Care to quantify that? It's not 0%.

Even 1% of view time thrown at older content is a lot of hours.

Americans watch something like 1.5 billion hours of video per day when we combine TV and internet.

If we look at the broadcast channels in the US, and estimate they put out 20 hours of shows on the average day, then a historic archive 70 years deep would have half a million hours of video.

If one tenth of one percent of view time went to old broadcast shows in particular, then that's 3x the archive size daily and 1000x the archive size yearly.

And all the standard definition content combined would be well under a petabyte.

Two gems (among many)...

Periscope Films (on YouTube): https://m.youtube.com/@PeriscopeFilm/playlists

Digitized 40-60s era reels. It still amazes me how effectively they presented complex topics then. E.g. mechanical naval gunnery computers: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gwf5mAlI7Ug

And this on-the-ground movie on the Columbia student occupation in 1968: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BUcYLuGiL_s

I've downloaded shows created before both my parents were even born, and some others not as old but still older than me. I don't think it's the norm but I doubt it's that uncommon

There are probably some people (other than historians) into that stuff.

For a parallel example, the earliest records of anime stretch back to winter 1917 (!), though no-one has recordings of those any more:

https://anidb.net/anime/season/1917/winter/?do=calendar&h=1

Some of the slightly newer anime (summer 1917!) used to be on YouTube but the account seems to have been deleted. Unsure if by YouTube or by the account holder:

* https://anidb.net/anime/5862

* https://anidb.net/forum/thread/10412#c461218

* https://youtu.be/AnxMNq2QbvA

This account on YouTube seems to have a bunch of anime from around that period, along with some modern stuff too:

https://www.youtube.com/@ccm1112/videos

They watch it themselves (and sometimes make reaction videos to it). They watch it with their parents. They watch it as part of a class. They study history and watch it. There are so many ways in which this statement is demonstrably false.

Younger people will watch it when it gets spoofed and meme'd. Tiktok is massively overrun with people watching things and reacting to them, I'm sure a genre of MST3k style reaction videos to cheesy old content would do well there.

Most content, new or old, is slop not worth watching. And since there are more content from the past than in the present, that means most content worth watching will be from the past.

Do you limit yourself to reading books released in 2023, or do you give any book a chance regardless of age? Most of the greatest books ever written were not first published this year!

> who is going to watch all of this older content?

Historians, archivists, and everyone who is interested in having access to the past.

> younger generations do not watch older content

This is completely false.

I was literally just searching for an episode of The Fifth Estate from 1988 a week ago. A current events/documentary show is never going to get remade.

There's plenty of reasons that people watch old shows. Even on streaming services, the biggest shows seem to be older stuff like The Office, Seinfeld, Friends, etc. Seinfeld will never get remade, and Friends and the Office might, but will not in any way reflect the original.

Going to youtube its pretty clear that there is plenty of demand for old shows: Secrets of War, an obscure 90s era cable documentary show has millions of views across the episodes they uploaded.

My kids like the silent movies I’ve shown them enough that sometimes they ask to watch another, unprompted. And I gladly watch talkies with them, too, it’s not like this is one of those “they only suffer it to spend time with dad” things.

I wasn’t born when those came out, either. My parents weren’t born when those played in theaters, for that matter. For many, neither were my grandparents.

I watch TV shows from before I was born, pretty often.

People watch older content all the time.

The current state of affairs is a real shame.

The guys behind the Curiosity Show bought all the episodes and are uploading them to youtube. Great science show for kids. I've never seen a better kids science show.

I very well might. My parents watched Doctor Who religiously in their 20s/30s, and I watched some of it in syndication with them when I was a kid. I never got into the 21st century version of it, though. But being able to watch the old stuff would be a connection back to my parents that I would love to have.

We do enjoy old stuff. And it still deserves to be preserved even if nobody did. It does not matter if not a single person on this earth watches that content, human beings toiled to create it and therefore it does not deserve to be lost to the mists of time.

You have no idea how many movies I've watched that are ~100 years old.

> which is funny, as who is going to watch all of this older content? younger generations do not watch older content.

That's pretty obviously false. People watch old episodes of, to name two easy examples, Johnny Carson or the Letterman Show. Whether that's to see a comedian (eg Rodney Dangerfield) or a band perform on Letterman, and so on. People love to watch old episodes of SNL, and we know that by the enormous view counts. They love to watch old music videos from before their time.

People were funny in the past, too. Bands were great in the past, too.

Stop caring about that ignorant crowd.

Ml training for example.

"Generate cartoon in style of"

Researchers.

So you've never watched an old film? Listened to music from before you were born? Read a book from before you were born?

There was more than enough of this stuff when I was young, but instead of watching police academy 26 I watched something actually good.

Tell that to the all the young people at Mrs. Roper Romp Drag Queen Parties.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/22/arts/television/mrs-roper...