I just buy DVDs/Blue-rays. That way I own the medium, can watch it any time at superior quality (video + audio) and get some bonus content (behind the scene, interviews, deleted scenes, etc.) too. And I watch amateur short clips on YouTube. It's amazing how short sighted average joes are.
Btw. I can play some 1983 audio CDs just fine, multimedia CD-ROMs from 1990 and DVDs from 1996. Neither a hard disk nor flash-drive nor an internet service will last that long. Triva: Did you know MySpace.com used to be a online storage service (think of DropBox) during the dot-com bubble, it resurfaced as social media website years later, and years later it rebooted as social media website again (with little success) and you know both first two iterations of content are lost forever. Welcome to reality.
The first new 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray (max 100 GB) just came out on March 1th.
> Btw. I can play some 1983 audio CDs just fine, multimedia CD-ROMs from 1990 and DVDs from 1996. Neither a hard disk nor flash-drive nor an internet service will last that long.
A hard drive is much easier to back up and transfer to fresh storage than a stack of CDs.
$70 for 25x25GB archival discs is pretty reasonable. Almost 9GB per dollar. The 100GB discs are ~5.8GB per dollar, but if taking up 1/4th the space and 1/4 the disc-swapping is worth it, those could be a good option ($425 for 25x100GB)
I meant the few early 1980s audio CDs I own. All still work fine. Pressed CDs last a lot longer than burned CDs. I only ever had problems with CD I burned myself (especially a CD production series in the early 2000s).
