The video archive on the Comedy Central website had stored all episodes of "The Daily Show" since 1999, clips from all 11 seasons of "The Colbert Report," "Key & Peele," "South Park," "Workaholics" and more. Yesterday, Paramount removed the video archive and its 25 years of footage from the site, and a pop-up now reads, "Most Comedy Central series are no longer available," but "To watch many seasons of Comedy Central shows, Please sign up for Paramount+."

Perhaps the most profitable show for Paramount Global's CEO trio, who recently declared a cost-cutting campaign (via Hollywood Reporter) to address the company's financial collapse. Earlier this week, as Variety reported, Paramount shut down MTVnews.com and removed 20 years of news coverage. Last week, the Internet Archive removed access to 500,000 digitized books following a lawsuit from a major book publisher.

The loss of such media stores invokes the same longstanding concern that drives game preservation advocates: that once access to media is lost, that media is often unrecoverable. In addition to its library of digitized books, the Internet Archive hosts over 20,000 PC and MS-DOS games.

Once digital media become outdated, they quickly lose relevance. Unless it is in the best interest of shareholders, the effort is not something that corporate media managers can safely expect to invest in. Out-of-print games are just waiting to be remastered, and those remasters may never happen. Live-service digital-only games disappear into the void when the plug is pulled (Marvel Heroes RIP, we miss you every day). Meanwhile, as The Verge reported in 2023, companies like Warner Bros. Discovery are so eroded by profit margins that they are willing to cancel shows for tax deductions.

As much as I would like to believe in the Internet as a decentralized bastion of human knowledge, frankly, the signs are not encouraging as to what we stand to lose without supporting archival efforts. According to a Pew Research study, 38% of web pages accessible in 2013 will be gone by 2024, and 54% of Wikipedia articles cite at least one website that no longer exists. But take heart. Some of them will eventually be listed on Paramount+.