My grandmother was born in a house without running water, no sanitation and no phone. That's just a bit over a century ago. The rate of change on an annual basis isn't all that large, a decade and you'll see big changes, our world can't be compared at all to 120 years ago in terms of luxury, communications, personal energy budget, food, travel options etc. Still, there are large areas of the planet where the last 120 didn't bring any progress and there are those where they actually went backwards, not rarely to our (the western world for me) benefit.
Things have been moving along.
edit: comments are quibbling about the fraction of all movies ever I can see on a paid streaming service. This is like complaining about that the meals and elbow room are not wonderful on a $400 flight from LA to London. It's a goddam miracle and you're still grumbling. Please tell me now how your $12/mo Spotify account doesn't have the June 1972 Grateful Dead New Jersey show your mom was at, and is thus near worthless. I spent $12 in 1980s money on single album in my youth.
Let me amend my grossly hyperbolic statement and say I could stream on demand more movies than I could ever watch even if I did nothing else the rest of my life, including many but not all of the good ones. Now the statement is strictly true, but did this make my contribution better?
We could have maglev trains and superconducting supercomputers and copyright will still be deleting our culture to “save money” for corporate copyright owners to increase their profit margins.
Your 50,000 movies is a lot but its not even half of the movies made since 1995 that UNESCO were able to reliably cite data for. I can't deep link to the exact spreadsheet of data but it's under the culture data section and its feature film statistics. The total number of feature films (which will exclude some things like short films and other stuff based on various data processing considerations) produced around the world between 1995 and 2017 is at least (because there are likely more movies shot than produced) 107,432.
Assuming your "over 50,000" is the usually marketing line and being generous and assuming its somewhere between 50,000 and 55,000 movies, then if true that's approximately half the "feature films" produced between 1995 and 2017...
A a sensible lower bound extrapolation based on the data is in the range of half a million feature films (again recognising this data is likely excluding things we would on average collectively call a movie), making your service closer to 10%... or possibly even lower...
Over 50,000 movies feels like a lot until you dig into how much media we make as a species. That's just feature films, likely only ones with a theatrical release (I don't think I can reliably translate a lot of the source documents even if I wanted to validate the source data criteria myself, hence I'm using the weasel word "likely"), meaning its excluding a LOT of film/movies, and its only for 1995 to 2017, covering an era where the "amateur film" scene was rapidly exploding due to falling costs of the technology behind recording, editing, and distribution a "movie"...
None of this is to tear down the effort of hard working preservationists... both legal and illegal. I agree with the archivists I've had conversations with, whose collective opinion can be summed up quite simply. "Any copy is better than no copy."
One of my favorite movies of all time is “Contact” mainly because of how damn _hopeful_ it portrays humanity. I want to live in that world, not the gloom and doom “we’re ruining everything around us” that is so often shown in recent media.
And the whole thing is perplexing to me because as you’ve put it, we _are_ living in the future! There is soo many great things happening around us, but people seem not to notice - not just the technological things you’ve mentioned - but societal too.
Like because of recent developments in economy theory, the world altering global shut down due to corona did not end with a great depression like event for the whole world, and that alone to me is simply a miracle.
Human longevity studies have now reproducibly able to reverse aging _in primates_ - human trials starting this year!
Feminism has become all but mainstream, unlocking like 50% more of human ingenuity.
Urbanism studies have finally popularized environments where people can live happily and sustainably their entire lives, while there have always existed places in the world that are “nice” to live in one way or another, we’re kinda getting the science down why, and starting to popularize it a little (strongtowns).
Its just a crazy good time to be alive, there are countless problems all around us but they are actually getting solved at least somewhere, instead of banging our collective heads against the wall, one can just look for how it has been successful handled somewhere else and try to replicate!
You must have one hell of a different streaming services experience from that of most people today if you can pull this off without engaging in a fair bit of torrenting and general piracy.
Some examples: https://www.yardbarker.com/entertainment/articles/popular_mo...
