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It took a few minutes sleuthing to validate that my gut reaction of "but there's way more than 50000 movies" was right ... But thanks to UNESCO statistics (http://data.uis.unesco.org/) I've got the sad truth.

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."




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