[cowboyscott]

It's apples to oranges, but it's interesting contrasting this with community-driven efforts in the gaming preservation space. It's a relatively simple matter to find, say, a full archive of the vast majority if not all commercially released games for the Sega Genesis, along with a smattering of unreleased prototypes that have found their way into community hands. Many, like myself, are hobbyist digital archivists, curating collections of data and hardware for exploring the medium.

Film and TV are harder for a number of reasons. Video is just bigger, and the vast majority of works have their primary versions on film and tape that take far more effort to preserve (physically or digitally). Having said that, I believe Hollywood shot themselves in the foot by so aggressively going after piracy (the same can be said about music) in a way that the video game industry didn't (Nintendo's recent efforts notwithstanding). They spent fortunes on lawyers and lobbyists to protect short-term profits (and, realistically, how many ticket sales did they save?), at the expense of locking away our shared cultural history.