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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?

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With AI, this entire vast content library is about to be worthless anyway. We'll be making more long-form, quality content per month than entire Hollywood production years. And if you include short form content and slop, it'll be more content per second than entire years. When faced with infinite content, people will reach for content currently popular in the zeitgeist or content that addresses niche interests. Holly…

Silicon Valley Brain Rot claims another victim. Sad to see.

I have direct experience with this field.

I've written, directed, and acted in independent films. I've worked on everything from three person crews all the way up to 200 person shots. Even mocap and virtual production.

We're now developing film and VFX tools for individual artists, and the world is full of artists. It's been starved for films, however. The studio production system only had so much annual capacity per year, and most creators never get the opportunity to helm a project of their own.

You're not crying over the accessibility of digital art, digital music, indie games, or writing.

Film production and distribution has been bottlenecked at the studio level for far too long due to capital, logistics, and (previously) distribution barriers. That's all changing now.

Films are going to look more like fanfiction.net, Bandcamp, ArtStation, and Steam. That's a good thing.

I have friends in IATSE (film crew union) and AI is going to hurt their work. The nature of work changes, and new opportunities arise. But what's hurting them right now is that film productions are being offshored to Europe and Asia to break up their unions and bank on cheaper local labor. Production in Atlanta is one sixth of what it was just a few years ago.

I also have friends who write and direct that are looking at this as their big chance to build their own audience.

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

#183
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.

They do.

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

#184
post #157
post #34

Free money? It's probably zero effort to upload them to YouTube. People watch them. YouTube generates ad revenue and pays out Warner Brothers. They probably choose the movies nobody wants to pay for any more on VoD/DVD and nobody views on paid streaming services.

I wonder if any of them will make back the amount of dollars the intern was paid to upload them.

I would say 1 million views should roughly pay the interns salary for a month. Some of the movies accumulated around a million views within the first 10 days.

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

#185
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 takes a lot of YouTube views to add up to a Apple/Amazon/etc rental.

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

#186
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> they continue to get it wrong for live event streaming

And truly live (which means probably under 10 seconds from lens to viewer - i.e. the time it takes for the "X win" notification to pop up on your phone) is even harder than traditional "live" in the 40-60 second window.

Ideally you want all viewer to view it at the same time (so when next-door are cheering on a feed 3 seconds ahead of you it's not spoilt).

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

#187

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.

"you should just do X" generally means you don't have the full picture. You're completely disregarding all the union stuff that needs to be considered. You're forgetting all the little guys that make movies happen. Yeah the directors and actors probably don't care, but the other 100s of other people involved in making films probably do.

Edit: You're right. Just disregard any laws and contracts in place. HN knows best. It must be that easy.

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

#188
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 takes a lot of YouTube views to add up to a Apple/Amazon/etc rental.

But it also takes very little effort or cost... It's effectively free money at their scale.. no bandwidth fees, no storage, no user membership, etc... it's hard to sell a pile of junk no one wants to watch in a subscription too -- okay that might be harsh, but a LOT of old stuff is do do hard to watch nowadays... So there's certainly some great classics.. but also a lot of stuff that most people would never watch outside a class assignment

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

#189
There was a time fairly early in Netflix's streaming era when all the studios were just dumping their old back catalogs on Netflix to get some revenue from 'dead content' that I thought "Wow, someday soon pretty much all the old content will just be available on a central streaming service. The future will be good."

Then the stock market started inflating the value of streamers because of ARR projections and studios adopted a gold rush mentality, pulled back all their content and each tried to launch their own service. Of course, this quickly fragmented the streaming market as few consumers would subscribe to more than one or two services at a time. As stock valuations dropped back to reality, the server plus bandwidth costs started piling up and the also-ran streaming services became break-even boat anchors for most studios.

Now we're left with the cultural 'worst of all worlds'. A dozen inaccessible walled gardens each neglected by their owners and no easy, central way to find and watch an old, low-value film.

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

#190
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?

For the type of rich people like actors, sports stars, etc, yes.

You may have an actor of a certain budget who has no roles lined up currently, but is a pretty safe bet he will get some lined up eventually, and so he's a decent risk for a loan.

This is private lending and is a completely different world than a home loan that is resold. Depending on the dollar amount, the lender will have their own appraisers, etc taking careful look at the collateral (which might be the castle you're buying, or that and more, or something else entirely, like royalties due, etc).

They will then structure it so that it's a heads they win, tails they don't lose - only lending as much as they're sure they'll be able to get back out (up to and including having alternate buyers lined up to purchase the property if it gets foreclosed, etc).

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