Russia has been trying to make a whitelisted internet for over a decade. It’s still easy to get around their blocks with obfuscated VPNs etc, even my parents can do it. It’s really really difficult to implement this kind of blocks without breaking everything. It’s possible to access the outside net even from China if you know what you’re doing. Worst-case scenario, your local mesh network nerds will hook more and more people up to the network, eventually the town-local movie sharing groups will come back like in the good old days. And even if they shut all that down, movie swapping groups will pop up in big cities - piracy existed long before the internet, after all.
As for the hardware, well, yes, that’s a concern on some level. But then again you can still play DVD-quality movies on 20 year old potatoes with Linux, and DVD-quality is quite watchable if you aren’t too snobby about it. There’s a lot of old computing hardware around, even if no new computers are produced starting now we will be fine for a while just with second-hand parts and dumpster diving. Perhaps the biggest concern for video content specifically is storage, which has a more limited lifetime and is also getting very difficult to find new, but if you’re only aiming at DVD-quality, a few dozen TBs will give you something to watch for the rest of your life.
Russia has been trying to make a whitelisted internet for over a decade. It’s still easy to get around their blocks with obfuscated VPNs etc, even my parents can do it. It’s really really difficult to implement this kind of blocks without breaking everything. It’s possible to access the outside net even from China if you know what you’re doing. Worst-case scenario, your local mesh network nerds will hook more and more people up to the network, eventually the town-local movie sharing groups will come back like in the good old days. And even if they shut all that down, movie swapping groups will pop up in big cities - piracy existed long before the internet, after all.
As for the hardware, well, yes, that’s a concern on some level. But then again you can still play DVD-quality movies on 20 year old potatoes with Linux, and DVD-quality is quite watchable if you aren’t too snobby about it. There’s a lot of old computing hardware around, even if no new computers are produced starting now we will be fine for a while just with second-hand parts and dumpster diving. Perhaps the biggest concern for video content specifically is storage, which has a more limited lifetime and is also getting very difficult to find new, but if you’re only aiming at DVD-quality, a few dozen TBs will give you something to watch for the rest of your life.