Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

tedium.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 485 posts

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

#121

Post by Mistletoe »

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…

This is wonderful news. My Waiting for Guffman dvd was lost at some point and I often open its case wanting to watch and remember again and get disappointed like Corky.

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

#122

Post by giancarlostoro »

Anything from before the 1980s should just be on YouTube, its easy cash for them on films that are sitting idle otherwise. Anything they aren't licensing to anyone anywhere should just be on YouTube. Or any sort of streaming platform that has sane ads, and anyone can see. It is really sad to me there's no genuine YouTube competitor.

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

#123

Post by aidenn0 »

scarab92 wrote: post #88
SteveNuts wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't let the cloud providers fool you. Bandwidth is cheap, especially for Googles, Netflixes and Cloudflares of the world which peer with every ISP that matters.

Is Comcast still charging content providers and CDNs for peering?

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

#124

Post by meithecatte »

robertlagrant wrote: post #86
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…

It would be really nice if YouTube could give uploaders the ability to schedule ad slots, rather than them appearing randomly. Unless they do this already and stuff I watch just does it badly, of course.

I'm pretty sure this is a feature that's available at least to big creators – I remember a Tom Scott video doing a bit involving scheduling an ad at a particularly fitting moment.

You might have to be a YouTube partner or something like that to make use of this stuff, though.

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

#125

Post by xattt »

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’d like to note that older movies have often been “live streamed” in an ad-supported format for many decades.

You were even able to use your own equipment to “download” these movies to local “storage” and keep a collection with enough determination. The resolution was often terrible, somewhere around 240i and 360i.

/s

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

#126

Post by dylan604 »

SllX wrote: post #113
SteveNuts wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah, FAST services as referenced by the parent are an entire genre of streaming services that might have slipped under the radar for most Hacker News readers.[1] They’d be off my radar too since I’m not interested in them per se, but for Jason Snell’s excellent Downstream[2] podcast (earlier episodes co-hosted by Julia Alexander) covering basically the business of Hollywood with an emphasis on streaming services and r…

YouTube serving content with ads would be more AVOD (on-demand with ads) vs FAST. FAST typically means a linear feed programmed to play specific content at specific time just like tuning into a channel on OTA or cable networks.

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

#127

Post by brudgers »

Why? My guess is the data Youtube Analytics makes available and the potential for making something a cult classic.

To boot, if there’s no revenue, there’s no need to pay creative people. Indeed, if it boosts expenses under Hollywood accounting practices, those expenses might offset other income that would otherwise be owed to artists and their estates.

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

#128

Post by dylan604 »

vlan0 wrote: post #79
SteveNuts wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bandwidth is a part, but that’s an easy hurdle. But running a CDN at that scale is gonna require experience and truck load of money. The juice really has to be worth the squeeze. Similar to running on-prep vs cloud.

> But running a CDN at that scale is gonna require experience and truck load of money

Take Netflix for example. Their CDN at scale is pretty good for VOD type of delivery, but they continue to get it wrong for live event streaming. Even Twit..er, X falls down with their large event live streaming.

Adding the "live" component makes everything just that much harder

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

#129

Post by JKCalhoun »

duxup wrote: post #15
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 surprised a lot of things aren't more accessible. So much content not making money / available ANYWHERE. I assume, that maybe the amount of difficulty in terms of getting permission is too high to bother so nobody does?

Abandonmedia. They've been posting abandoned software for decades now — without a peep as far as I know.

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

#130

Post by chatmasta »

atVelocet wrote: post #107
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.

Not sure I’m understanding you, but it sounds like you’re asking why not upload a video that’s scrambled until viewed with a browser plugin that knows how to unscramble it?

That would be cool, but it won’t be very effective as a viral video if everyone needs to have a browser plugin installed :)

The challenge here is to circumvent the copyright algorithms while still looking like a normal video to the user (who has no external tools installed).

However, for things like hosting pirated streams or sharing content out-of-band, it would be interesting. It’s basically the a minimally lossless form of steganography.

Post reply on HN