Or just wait for Moore's law. In 2007, internet storage is $3/GB/yr, much lower than what it was/would have been in 1997. Those prices are probably going to come down as well, so the $200k/yr estimate seems way high.

(I wonder if Pixar's costs are lower, and they can just store the bzipped rendering scripts and soundtrack.)

Storage is just a small part of the problem. Formats change all the time, and who knows if it's readable in 50 years?

then it makes sense to store, along with the data, two codecs that will make a array of bitmaps and an uncompressed raw audio file. (project gutenberg, for example, always has a plain text version whenever there's a more elaborate format.)

That's with historical proprietary formats.

Moore's Law doesn't save you when you also have computers on the other end producing the data.

But you've always got humans consuming it. When they evolve into an entirely new medium, that's a different problem, but there's a canonical 1-3 hour format in a medium-large room. DVDs now have bloopers and commentary, but they aren't anywhere nearly as valuable as the movie itself, so those are more error-resilient.

Incidentally, video understanding has been called the Inverse Hollywood problem, translating to scripts, and if you can just store the scripts that will generate the movie, you can do massively better video modeling and compression.

Except you're storing data produced by yesteryear's computers with today's storage when you copy. Once a film is in the can it's static.

Today wins.