Pirating anime is essentially a solved problem and has been for a few years now.
Anime has always been pretty rife with piracy. From the LD and tape days to boutique fansub groups to rips of official simulcasts today, people have always pirated anime. But only in the last 5–10 years have we essentially solved piracy. That is to say, the amount we can pirate (of course, way more than we can actually consume) cannot keep up with the amount of storage a home user can accumulate.
A while ago, I ran the numbers using MAL’s API and got about 29k anime, counting movies, OVAs, series, etc. as separate entries. I think this is about as accurate as we can get. More importantly, it probably comes close to accounting for the media that’s actually available. There’s another project, anime-offline-database, that aggregates multiple online databases and comes up with a total of about 41k entries. Keep in mind that this includes many movies, OVAs, and shorts, but let’s assume the worst case: around 530k distinct episodes of anime. I think this is a gross overestimate, and the real number is maybe 50% of that, but let’s use this number as an upper bound.
Currently, reasonable anime releases are about 1.3 GB per episode. It’s been this way for a few years—maybe ten or fifteen. Interestingly enough, thanks to codec improvements, file sizes have remained unchanged or are often smaller nowadays with HEVC. Older shows were often encoded and available in much smaller sizes because their resolution was much lower. For our exercise, we can assume an average file size of 1 GB per episode for easy math.
Thus, the total amount of anime that has been created in the world so far can be stored in 530 TB in the worst case. Realistically, collecting anything close to this would not be possible, given that not all anime is still available. I also don’t think those estimates are anywhere near correct. I’ll explain later.
530 TB of storage alone would cost around $5.3k at $10 per TB (using storage prices from before the AI shortage).
That sounds expensive, but this is a worst case. It is entirely reasonable for a normal consumer to pay that amount of money to have a repository of all anime. It’s something a normal person could have sitting in a single computer case next to their desk. Folks pay thousands of dollars every few years for graphics cards that depreciate faster than this. You do not need a data center or some fancy tape storage. You can have it on spinning disks. You don’t need some enterprise-level storage solution.
But let’s calculate the future of anime: there are roughly 150–250 new anime series every year. Add in a few movies and maybe OVAs, and, using back-of-the-napkin math, we have perhaps 350 cours of anime each year. That would be roughly 5–6 TB of anime per year. Since file sizes and episode runtimes have remained roughly stable, I don’t expect this to increase much. I think adding 6 TB a year to your storage is fairly reasonable. You can buy a 20–24 TB external backup drive and be set for about four years. Over the next 40 years, you’ll acquire a total of 200–240 TB of new anime under these assumptions, which is really not much.
Our current release cycle is also why I believe the estimate of 530 TB is incorrect. If the next 40 years of anime would require only 240 TB of storage, I think acquiring all previous anime in a reasonable format would require around that much or even less. Either way, it’s only a couple of thousand dollars.
For an upper bound of $10k, you can build an appliance right now that would store all anime from now until you die (or at least until I die). Realistically, I would estimate that it would cost only half that, given that so much anime is lost media, but we’re talking theoretically.
I think that this phenomenon would apply to other media too. Books especially are probably solved, but I’m not knowledgeable about movies or TV shows. It might be a few years before a layperson can, with a little bit of money, theoretically fit every piece of visual or audio media on their home PC.