The point they make is not moot however. You can find a flyer printed today in an attic in a hundred years and there is a decent chance you can still read the i

The point they make is not moot however. You can find a flyer printed today in an attic in a hundred years and there is a decent chance you can still read the information. If you find a thumbdrive with the same flyer as a pdf from a hundred years ago it will take a team of experts with specialized (or at this point very old) hardware to figure out the contents. Video is even worse: a film roll that you can look at with your bare eyes vs some realplayer codec nobody can decode. This is why the library of congress lasers video onto analog film for archival. Reading an analog film is a question of blasting light through the transported film. Reading the equivalent realplayer file involves a little bit more in terms of hardware, OS and software (and this is just one codec I picked randomly).