Example 1:
Right during the pandemic, TFI (French TV) put up all past seasons of its show ‘Star Academy’. It was something I have been trying to get hold of but did not have any luck. As soon as it popped I thought I got it all. (2 years ago). Today I found out I was missing the first season (8 in total) and went to try to grab it. ALL seasons have now been removed. I am quite pissed at it!
Example 2:
A user upscaled Britney Spear music videos using AI. The results were mind blowing. I grabbed all the videos I could (official ones are 480p/720 p max limited). Less than 1 week later, the content was gone…forever.
Example 3: (Non YT)
Not YT. Koh Lanta (French equivalent of Survivor) is aired on french TV (TFI again). As soon as the season is over, they take it down. You are unable to rewatch/watch it if you missed the air/stream time. ALL past seasons are also not available and that spans to about 20+ years of contents and 30+seasons. Same applies to US Survivor but to a lesser extent. And you need to keep paying to ‘stream’ it.
Conclusion:
Always archive media you want to rewatch/collect. Streaming is not your friend. It is just another way of controlling content distribution, tying you up to the ‘subscription’ slavery model instead of owning your contents and worse, down the line downright CENSORING or MODIFYING contents to fit whatever garbage narrative is currently en vogue.
Stay focused brothers!
I (finally!) installed Tube Archivist last week and went through my library of already archived YT videos and saved them manually in TA (it’s the easiest way if you haven’t saved the metadata to go with the video, which I hadn’t for the oldest videos). Out of almost 1000 videos over five years or so, maybe 5% have gone private or is gone from YT. And it was mostly videos I really wanted to keep. Now comes the dirty work of trying to find the metadata for those missing videos since I do have them locally. I have done some research around how to do it, but if anyone has actually figured it out it would be nice to know!