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Interestingly it is good to know that the quality of digitised video in the cloud (YouTube etc) decreases over time as well. The endless cycles of reencoding do

• rhizome 6y ago
  This is essentially the argument -- I believe I read it from Steve Albini originally -- for the benefits of analog recording: digital files are always going to be reproduced at whatever bitrate and sampling rate the file was created with (not to mention the original recording), but analog equipment has improved greatly. A 78RPM record sounds orders of magnitude better than it did on the equipment that existed when the record was first released. Heck, even amplification means that a silent movie with a keyboardist or orchestra will sound better for everybody in the theater, not to mention saving the vocal cords of the intertitle card narrator (if applicable). Conversion equipment is always improving as well. The Super-8 movies I had digitized 20 years ago should be reconverted again because they were ripped at 640x480, which was the style at the time. I'm not sure of the world of upsampling algorithms, but I bet those are improving as well. Digitized media will never look or sound better than they do now, and that's on consumer equipment. Ripping VHS with current hardware would undoubtedly result in a better image than 10 years ago. Backing them up and preservation, on the other hand, is much easier with digital media.