Ramblings about streaming services and offline data --------------------------------------------------- Some people say the internet never forgets... now, i tend to disagree. It may be that things will be still archived on some HDD or backup tape in some server farm, but much content will become at least hard to find or simply impossible to access for the general populous, especially if you consider stuff that is hosted on some platform like youtube. If you go back a couple of years (ok, maybe 10 -15 years) it was not uncommon in my circles to have tons and tons of videos on a HDD or DVDs stached away to share with friends or family - not to mention the large mp3 and software collections! This is now more or less a thing from the past, killed by ever available streaming services. What most people not notice: Things go missing. It may be due to some shifting taste in the population, it may be due to some problems an account can have with automatic content filtering, it may be that the person who manages the account simply is not anymore in the mood to continue to care for the content. Whatever the reason, things you may take for to have acces to may be gone the next time you look for them. It came to this thought while thinking about todays kids shows, at least in germany they are total garbage compared to the stuff that did run in the 80s. My first thought was to expose our son mostly to the old stuff you could find without any problem on youtube, my next thought was: "What if the channels that host that stuff are gone in a few month?"... well, after checking out a few channels i tended to visit a couple of years ago which had absolutely great content in form of old documentaries online and finding out they are gone i am now downloading what i can.