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Why is Warner Bros. Discovery putting old movies on YouTube?

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Re: Why is Warner Bros. Discovery putting old movies on YouTube?

#101

Post by daggersandscars »

They're not being dumped. Putting them on YT lets WB make passive money while maintaining control of their rights with little effort on their part. If WB makes a better deal down the road, they can hide or delete the movies from YT.

This also makes some of the movies more valuable by revealing hidden demand. WB will see their YT stats for their films and see where future investments or licensing deals may pay off. A streaming company is disincentivized to tell the movie owner how the film is doing.

Re: Why is Warner Bros. Discovery putting old movies on YouTube?

#103

Post by zeristor »

vanderZwan wrote: post #51

> Anyway, Waiting for Guffman still holds up, and you can watch it on YouTube, for free. On top of that it never was released outside of the US before! As a European fan of Spinal Tap I'm quite excited to finally be able to see this film. Also: no mention of The Mission, which is also in the list? That's quite a critically acclaimed one. Just look at these opening paragraphs from its wikipedia page: > The Mission is…

For some reason I thought the Eurythmics single "Missionary Man" which came about at the same time was the film tie in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionary_Man_(song)

Re: Why is Warner Bros. Discovery putting old movies on YouTube?

#104

Post by wongarsu »

browningstreet wrote: post #7
timmg wrote: post #2

I assume they get "monetization" from Youtube and they don't need to worry about hosting or discovery. Probably better than doing nothing with these films.

I'm a little surprised there isn't more of this. Building a streaming service is pretty expensive.. a lot of the platforms lost money doing so and really only made it back when they merged into an umbrella of other services. I'm also a little surprised no one has yet (AFAIK) done the "viral indie release to Youtube" path. I feel like it's sitting there waiting to be exploited.

Rooster Teeth (of "Red vs Blue" and "RWBY" fame) did the "indie filmmaker on youtube" thing pretty successfully. Eventually they moved to their own site, then fell apart after a lot of drama and internal differences.

Also vaguely guestures at all of youtube. Most youtube creators are independent, and a lot of them have higher production value than indie movies. You just don't recognize them because of how the algorithm and monetization favor regular installments of ~10 minute episodes, causing most content to take that form. A documentary simply works better on youtube as a Tom Scott video than as a 45 minute piece (though there are plenty of those too)

Re: Why is Warner Bros. Discovery putting old movies on YouTube?

#105

Post by HDThoreaun »

SteveNuts wrote: post #71
lxgr wrote: post #30

Old movies have been available on various "free ad-supported streaming television" for a while now, so I'm actually more surprised it took copyright holders that long to realize that Youtube also shows ads and doesn't require people to install some wonky app that might or might not be available for their platform. Of course, region-specific copyright deals are incredibly complex etc. etc., so I could imagine it was j…

I assume that bandwidth is by far the biggest cost for running your own streaming service, so letting Google take that hit makes a lot of sense.

content is by far the biggest cost for running your own streaming service

Re: Why is Warner Bros. Discovery putting old movies on YouTube?

#106

Post by InitialLastName »

falcor84 wrote: post #76
rwmj wrote: post #42

When Jeremy Irons was asked why he did Dungeons & Dragons (2000), he replied "Are you kidding? I'd just bought a castle, I had to pay for it somehow" ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0190374/trivia/ )

As someone with more modest means, I'm wondering - was that just a quip, or is it really possible for rich people to buy property first, and then figure out how to pay for it? How do they finance it?

> How do they finance it?

The same way most people do, with a mortgage. The difference is what a bank is willing to lend you if they see you have a significantly higher than average income.

It's also possible he wasn't just talking about the purchase payment. Large, old, valuable buildings also often require very large upkeep bills.

Re: Why is Warner Bros. Discovery putting old movies on YouTube?

#107

Post by atVelocet »

chatmasta wrote: post #49

I don’t know about officially sanctioned releases, but I feel like I’ve watched entire movies through YouTube shorts at this point… there’s a really simple grift that rockets to the top of the algorithm and also pushes people into a pipeline for other clips of the movie: 1. Clip a movie scene and crop it for vertical aspect ratio (maybe some AI is used here to choose the focus point of the scene) 2. Add royalty-free…

What i never understood:

Why not use some kind of interlacing and randomly sort the lines. The result is a valid video file which could be uploaded to YouTube. Then deinterlace with a browser plugin and the random pattern used to scramble the lines. Same can be applied to the audio.

Re: Why is Warner Bros. Discovery putting old movies on YouTube?

#108

Post by HDThoreaun »

ninth_ant wrote: post #8
softwaredoug wrote: post #3

These are movies nobody is lining up to syndicate, for a company desperate for cash. Why not dump them on YouTube and get a bit of ad revenue? It’s low effort relative to the income it generates. Even if it’s unlikely to make much money.

The why not is because it potentially devalues the prestige of the individual work’s IP, and the brand in general. This is short-term optimization, par for the course with the new Disovery-owned Warner Bros.

WB has decided these movies have no prestige.

Re: Why is Warner Bros. Discovery putting old movies on YouTube?

#109

Post by tart-lemonade »

jerf wrote: post #36
browningstreet wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a little surprised there isn't more of this. Building a streaming service is pretty expensive.. a lot of the platforms lost money doing so and really only made it back when they merged into an umbrella of other services. I'm also a little surprised no one has yet (AFAIK) done the "viral indie release to Youtube" path. I feel like it's sitting there waiting to be exploited.

"I'm also a little surprised no one has yet (AFAIK) done the "viral indie release to Youtube" path. I feel like it's sitting there waiting to be exploited." There's a lot of "indies releasing things to YouTube directly". However, they're limited both by the algorithm and by the amount of money they can generate by that, so you get a fairly restricted set of genres that this can work with, like sketch comedy or (perha…

In a similar vein, I remember reading somewhere that creating shows for direct-to-streaming is liberating because, although it is quite similar to TV in that it's telling a story in chunks (usually 30 to 60 minutes) without a guarantee of continuation (renewal), you don't have the primary constraints of traditional television: fitting into a specific time slot, saving time for commercials, and creating hooks that lead neatly into each ad break to get the audience to stick around.

Re: Why is Warner Bros. Discovery putting old movies on YouTube?

#110

Post by abofh »

falcor84 wrote: post #76
rwmj wrote: post #42

When Jeremy Irons was asked why he did Dungeons & Dragons (2000), he replied "Are you kidding? I'd just bought a castle, I had to pay for it somehow" ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0190374/trivia/ )

As someone with more modest means, I'm wondering - was that just a quip, or is it really possible for rich people to buy property first, and then figure out how to pay for it? How do they finance it?

It depends on levels of money. At musk levels, it's cheaper to borrow from your shares on margin, spend that, and never repay anything but interest - no financing involved except lending out your own assets. At multi-million illiquid, you're going to go to a bank, show them accounts and historic income, and because you're an actor with bursty income, they'll smooth out the line and decide if the loan you want is above it or below it. He likely had the means for the down payment and the assets for enough monthlies that the bank felt it was de-risked, but you can also do hard-money loans and similar if you have expectations of payment - but they tend to come with heavy duty strings.

Which is to say - for musks, not like you or I, for the illiquid, very much the same process, but with money managers and the like doing the actual bank negotiation.

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