Public domain movies don't have to look terrible?

I never really gave it much thought before but film is in such a different category than other public domain works.
There aren't many surviving audio recordings from the 19th century and most songs have been replayed and rerecorded many times over, books are just words and while we certainly do lose some to time they have shown to be amazingly resilient. But film is so different.. first of all the actual film itself degrades fairly quickly and earlier transfer mediums were terribly low quality. I guess without financial motivation no one has really attempted to fix film history so we can preserve it in the public domain. That's what I find so cool about this idea.

www.indiegogo.com...

But who's going to do it for other films not just horror? I think one big online library for all public domain works should be made and then through crowd sourcing everything could be touched up and reuploaded.
I guess people with money don't care too much about free stuff but it seems like all the news I have heard over the past 10 years about preserving film in bunkers and stuff still has them out of reach for the public to access.
Anyone have any idea how expensive it would be to host terabytes upon terabytes of data? Probably more than mere advertising would cover right? I'm stuck in brain storming mode now. Does anyone have any input on this?

There's a site called letmewatchthis.ch that has more oldies than just the horror movies. They've had to change their name recently, but if you enter that old name into a search engine (i recommend duckduckgo), you'll find it as one of the top entries.

Edited to add: you can search by genre!

reply to post by Hushabye


Thanks, I've seen a few places collect free movies but usually the quality is terrible on older ones. Also not a fan of piracy myself and you can never really trust what is okay to be on there and what is not.

reply to post by Rineocerous


You're not downloading anything off that site. It's all streamed. Well, you can if you want. I don't.