Until you don't have a machine that can easily read that media.
I thought a bit like this until I married a historian and learned a bit more about how archives work. I assumed that digitizing everything would be a huge boon for the maintainability of the archive. But after now speaking with a bunch of archivists it seems like digital archives have a lot more problems than I originally expected and are way more underfunded than I expected.
The ability to read 1’s and 0’s will be around in 1000 years time. It will be easier to convert bluray to some new format when bluray reaches end of life. Bet you could find vhs schematics, if you couldn’t find an active vhs digitiser right now if you tried.
Will it? Will there be companies that make optical disk readers? Because it isn't enough to just say "well, they could read it." Chronically underfunded archivists need to be able to do it.
Do you honestly believe that bluray players will suddenly become unobtainable without people migrating to a more superior format first? Hard copies are vulnerable to literal rot, natural disaster, unintentional or intentional destruction, etc. Sotrage is measured in gigabytes or terabytes, where a single gigabyte would be sufficient to archive most medium sized libraries.
If you truly think that hard copies are less likely to last 1000 years (assuming redundancy / tech rollover) over soft copies, you lack a complete grasp on technology.
I used to believe what you believe. It seemed ridiculous that any other thing was possible. Then I spoke to an unusually large number of professional archivists who believe that given their limited funding digitization as a storage medium rather than a distribution method for a subset of the archive has very serious problems. Paper is actually remarkably resilient.
This isn't a question of technology. This is a question of archives, funding, and businesses.
I believe the fundamental answer is breadth. Breadth in formats, in storage methods, the more the merrier. Analog, digital, physical, the more different ways we have something archived, the more likely it is that the future will be able to access it. Archive video in every major video codec and at least one analog tape format as well. Don’t let perfection be the enemy of preservation, let it be but one tool. Especially with video, it’d be better to have the only usable copy of a work in 500 years be an analog tape, than only having digital formats available that may or may not be decodeable. There is no perfect answer, because it may very well be possible that there are also no working VTRs at that time, but with multiple formats you have multiple ways to access the content
Cost! Digitization efforts are barely funded as is. This is again one of those things that archivists would love to do but they look at their shoestring budgets and determine that other things are a higher priority.
