The Afterlife Is Expensive for Digital Movies | Hacker News Reader

The Afterlife Is Expensive for Digital Movies

nytimes.com

3 pointshhm10 comments

One way to solve the problem is to encourage people to copy your data. Historically the information that survived best has been whatever got copied most.

Or just wait for Moore's law. In 2007, internet storage is $3/GB/yr, much lower than what it was/would have been in 1997. Those prices are probably going to come down as well, so the $200k/yr estimate seems way high.

(I wonder if Pixar's costs are lower, and they can just store the bzipped rendering scripts and soundtrack.)

Storage is just a small part of the problem. Formats change all the time, and who knows if it's readable in 50 years?

then it makes sense to store, along with the data, two codecs that will make a array of bitmaps and an uncompressed raw audio file. (project gutenberg, for example, always has a plain text version whenever there's a more elaborate format.)

That's with historical proprietary formats.

Moore's Law doesn't save you when you also have computers on the other end producing the data.

But you've always got humans consuming it. When they evolve into an entirely new medium, that's a different problem, but there's a canonical 1-3 hour format in a medium-large room. DVDs now have bloopers and commentary, but they aren't anywhere nearly as valuable as the movie itself, so those are more error-resilient.

Incidentally, video understanding has been called the Inverse Hollywood problem, translating to scripts, and if you can just store the scripts that will generate the movie, you can do massively better video modeling and compression.

Except you're storing data produced by yesteryear's computers with today's storage when you copy. Once a film is in the can it's static.

Today wins.

> until some enterprising executive decided that the time was ripe for... a 25th-anniversary 3-D rerelease of "Barton Fink," with a hitherto unseen, behind-the-scenes peek at the Coen brothers trying to explain a Hollywood in-joke to John Turturro.

Man, I'd buy that in a second.

This is a very silly article. Storage gets progressively cheaper. If it costs 2^18 dollars to store it today, it'll cost $2^17 to recopy it next year, $2^16 the year after that, and so forth.

Basically, if it costs N dollars today, it will cost roughly 2N dollars over its lifetime.

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