I honestly would be totally fine with large providers being the ones to host and "own" all my media---_if_ they were obsessive stewards of data quality.

To me it seems very reasonable to have these things hosted in central repositories, with large corporate stewards of the creative works, which I can access on any device for a monthly fee. The creators and owners of the works could then upgrade them over time, e.g. to newer formats or to fix errors.

But in practice, this isn't how it turns out:

* Tons of Kindle books have minor typos or OCR errors. These will never get fixed. If I had local copies, I could fix them... But nobody else would benefit from my fixes.

* Disney+ has misconfigured four episodes in Daredevil season 1 to show forced English subtitles for when English is on the screen---e.g. when there's an exit sign, there will be forced subtitles for "EXIT". I can only imagine if I submit some sort of ticket for this it'll just disappear into the ether.

* The Marvel Unlimited comic app, to their credit, is doing a great job digitizing their giant backlog. But they haven't paid a lot of attention to the flow of series, so e.g. "annual" issues are not slotted into the series they're part of. Back in the days when I collected cbz files, I painstakingly placed them all in sequence.

* Spotify's music metadata is pretty bad, and its collection is missing things like game soundtracks. (Although it has plenty of indy remixes of game soundtracks, clogging up the search results.)

* I worry that the "original quality" of all this media is getting lost over time. Certainly watching shows on Netflix is going to be lower quality on an absolute scale than Blu-ray rips, right? Similarly, comics are transmitted to my device as JPGs---I hope someone has the original, uncompressed pages stored somewhere.

If I had local copies of all this media, I could organize it beautifully, fix typos, set up perfect metadata/subtitles/etc. I used to do that, with pirated media, back in college. But it doesn't feel like a great use of time these days, mainly because nobody else will benefit from my obsessive work.

I wish the custodians of this media would care more about it, or put in place systems for community contributions to improve it. But the incentives are not there in terms of $$$, sadly.

This is such an interesting point and a great comment. Thank you!