> "Thousands of hours of historical Sesame Street" is exactly the type of content that streaming services should be making economically viable for the first tim

> "Thousands of hours of historical Sesame Street" is exactly the type of content that streaming services should be making economically viable for the first time. I see what you mean, but if we are at all concerned about preservation of old media, a streaming platform is useless unless we are able to download it without any form of restriction. I doubt most platforms would be okay with that, because it would remove part of the incentive of continuing to subscribe to their platform. If I recall correctly, Netflix and Hulu both have some form of "offline access" to certain content that their studios produced, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is some sort heavy handed DRM associated with that. To make things more frustrating, consider this: Plenty of streaming services that have already come and gone. Most of those platforms had some amount of original content on it. Once the platform shut their servers off, viewers lost any form of access to it (assuming that there wasn't a workaround to download a local copy.) Theoretically, that media could pop up on another platform in the future if some deal is worked out between studios, but, I find it extremely unlikely, and even less likely that all of it would ever be available on a singular source. That is to say, there is a near guarantee that there is a growing amount of media that we will never have never know about, let alone have the chance to see. Technology seems to rotate through various trends. The only realistic possibility that I see of us finding any kind of long term solution to this issue is if there is a sudden, overwhelming shift back towards physical media (DVDs, Blu-ray, etc.) Without unrestricted physical access, the ability to access "lost" content is merely a expiration date, either by a subscription ending, or a platform dying off. The less likely alternative that I can think of would be some kind of gentlemen's agreement. Each time a new piece of content is created, a preserved copy is provided to a third party source, to be made public if that piece of content is no longer accessible. Something along the lines of how the Library of Congress works. I just don't see any studio being particularly interested in humoring that type of arrangement, unless it was a legal requirement, or something that was demanded through unions like Screen Actors Guild, Writer's Guild of America, etc.