While I think that Vint Cerf is correct in talking about the dangers of losing the ability to read files in various formats, my hope for long term access lies in open and standardized file formats and services like the fantastic archive.org (http://web.archive.org/web/*/markwatson.com is their history of my little web site, starting in 1996).
I think that HTML files in a standard character set like UTF-8 could be readable a thousand years from now if human civilization has not destroyed itself.
I hold out less hope for formats like various ogg formats, TIFF, JPEG, MPEG, etc. Software like computer games is even more problematic.
I am hopeful that the technology will improve for archiving digital assets. New storage technologies will become more reliable, much more information dense, and less expensive both to build and provide power for.
I don't think so. There will always be usage cases involving a couple orders of magnitude less capacity or bandwidth than the leading edge. Lossy compression will always be appropriate for these.
Anything involving wireless is a good start. There's a hard physical limit to the amount of data you can cram over 4G or 802.11 spectrum. It's physically impossible to losslessly stream video at 4k 60fps over these, so that's why we use lossy compression (currently MPEG) and always will.
You may be confused about TIFF. Long after JPEG dies a horrible death some medical facility and some state ran organization are going to have a system that reads TIFFs that's been running for 30 years.
I think that HTML files in a standard character set like UTF-8 could be readable a thousand years from now if human civilization has not destroyed itself.
I hold out less hope for formats like various ogg formats, TIFF, JPEG, MPEG, etc. Software like computer games is even more problematic.
I am hopeful that the technology will improve for archiving digital assets. New storage technologies will become more reliable, much more information dense, and less expensive both to build and provide power for.