Why is Warner Bros. Discovery putting old movies on YouTube? • Hacker News Board

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

#281

Post by Yizahi » Wed, Feb 05, 2025, 8:58 PM UTC

sfilmeyer wrote: post #269

Suppafly wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>With the exception of Netflix, these other companies' apps are similarly buggy and painful to use. Yeah it's really annoying that they all recreated the wheel instead of just playing ball with netflix or paying netflix to license their technology. The only feature I miss from another service is that x-ray view stuff that Amazon has to let you know who is in a scene.

>or paying netflix to license their technology Does Netflix license their technology to anyone? I know of examples like BAMTech, although I don't even know if they still take on outside clients or just do Disney now. I get that their might be good options to license and that fewer companies should build crappy in-house products, but is Netflix one of them? From Netflix's perspective, it's not clear to me that the pay…

I don't know about Netflix specifically, but some companies do sell all-in-one package solution to create your own kinda Neflix on prem. Don't know how great these solutions are, but I imagine with sufficient budget they should work ok.

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

#282

Post by cs-78 » Wed, Feb 05, 2025, 9:01 PM UTC

jmholla wrote: post #217

TuringNYC wrote: post #203

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. Judging from the clunky, buggy, nonsensical experiences on 2nd tier streaming services (i.e., everything except Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Disney+, Max), I'd say the biggest cost is probably hiring a decent Engineering+Product+Test team. There are complexities here,…

> Judging from the clunky, buggy, nonsensical experiences on 2nd tier streaming services (i.e., everything except Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Disney+, Max) With the exception of Netflix, these other companies' apps are similarly buggy and painful to use. I run into an at least issue daily (usually multiple times a day) in every streaming app I use except Netflix.

YouTube painful to use compared to Netflix ? Last week I noticed my video froze on netflix while audio moved ahead.

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

#283

Post by echelon » Wed, Feb 05, 2025, 9:03 PM UTC

cogman10 wrote: post #276

echelon wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes I exclude that, So humans steering diffusion is off limits? No Krea, no Invoke, no articulated humans? It's like you're taking away Premiere or Final Cut here. Text prompts are not the currency of AI film. Controllability levers are essential to this whole endeavor. > I do not think something that augmenting that input data counts towards actually reducing production costs and speeding up the process of creatin…

> I'll posit this: a two person team will make a better Star Wars, a better Lord of the Rings, a better Game of Thrones. An ensemble cast of actors piloting AI diffusion characters (or whatever future techniques emerge) will make a film as well acted as Glengarry Glen Ross. Perhaps even set in some fantasy or sci-fi landscape. I bet that we'll have a thousand Zach Hadels, Vivienne Medranos, and Joel Havers finding ma…

I think so.

> we judge "as good as starwars" using my above criteria.

Just to clarify, this would be an AI film or "tv show" winning at traditional awards: Emmys (The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences), SAG Awards, Oscars (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences), etc. Or traditional film festivals such as Sundance and Cannes, eg. winning the Palme d'Or. I would even be happy setting a threshold whereby a film or long-format show must win more than one award from several such institutions.

Maybe a preponderance of praise (20 or more) from major film and media critics like Roger Ebert (RIP), Leonard Maltin, Richard Brody, et al. could also be a criteria that must be met. Though perhaps that's a necessary condition anyway.

This all sounds good to me.

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

#284

Post by Suppafly » Wed, Feb 05, 2025, 9:03 PM UTC

sfilmeyer wrote: post #269

Suppafly wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>With the exception of Netflix, these other companies' apps are similarly buggy and painful to use. Yeah it's really annoying that they all recreated the wheel instead of just playing ball with netflix or paying netflix to license their technology. The only feature I miss from another service is that x-ray view stuff that Amazon has to let you know who is in a scene.

>or paying netflix to license their technology Does Netflix license their technology to anyone? I know of examples like BAMTech, although I don't even know if they still take on outside clients or just do Disney now. I get that their might be good options to license and that fewer companies should build crappy in-house products, but is Netflix one of them? From Netflix's perspective, it's not clear to me that the pay…

I don't know if they license it specifically, or if anyone has even approached them about it. I do think it's ridiculous that all of these companies are making their own solutions that are all terrible.

What they really should do is license their content to netflix for a fair price and just let netflix be the service people use.

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

#285

Post by Yizahi » Wed, Feb 05, 2025, 9:03 PM UTC

hatmanstack wrote: post #180

echelon wrote: post #154

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…

It seems most of the things Netflix produces is optimized by the algo for attention. When I feel it directing me gives me the ick. Looking at you Squid Game.

No need to suspect, they are advertising that openly and are proud of it. Famously, years ago they invented House of Cards TV show by looking at the most popular search tags and picked the most popular ones to select a genre and theme of a new show. It was a story of many articles about Netlix back then.

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

#286

Post by TuringNYC » Wed, Feb 05, 2025, 9:04 PM UTC

jmholla wrote: post #217

TuringNYC wrote: post #203

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. Judging from the clunky, buggy, nonsensical experiences on 2nd tier streaming services (i.e., everything except Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Disney+, Max), I'd say the biggest cost is probably hiring a decent Engineering+Product+Test team. There are complexities here,…

> Judging from the clunky, buggy, nonsensical experiences on 2nd tier streaming services (i.e., everything except Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Disney+, Max) With the exception of Netflix, these other companies' apps are similarly buggy and painful to use. I run into an at least issue daily (usually multiple times a day) in every streaming app I use except Netflix.

>> With the exception of Netflix, these other companies' apps are similarly buggy and painful to use.

I agree -- if I could separate these out into 3 categories rather than 2, Netflix/YT would be in a class of their own, way ahead of the pack.

I am constantly surprised how Apple TV offers such a poor experience despite their excellence in Product Management in other product areas. I was watching Apple TV last night and my wife and I slogged thru the recap and intro because we were so afraid of the app chocking on the "Skip" button.

Aside from Apple, which seems to be a Product Management issue, I find other platforms to bucket into two areas:

1. Poor performance, probably due to bad threading and poor cacheing

2. Incompatibility with older TVs. TVs last 8-10yrs easily these days, and features have topped off so people do not upgrade. This means you have a LOT of target builds and compatibility to check and I dont think they test all the possible builds.

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

#287

Post by Dylan16807 » Wed, Feb 05, 2025, 9:06 PM UTC

znpy wrote: post #262

deelowe wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I LOATHE peacock. I don't know what checks they do at the start of the stream, but they always peg me at 720p or lower resolution despite having over 300mb. Its not an issue on any other streaming app and they give you no option to set it manually. Streams look like a dog's breakfast on my 4k TVs.

Maybe the issue is on their side. Their best outcome is you paying for 4k hdr and streaming 720p. Bandwidth is expensive and slow to provision.

> Bandwidth is expensive and slow to provision.

Not enough to hurt a paid service. Let's say 6Mbps for pretty solid 1080p. And at peak maybe we have .5 streams per account going simultaneously (I bet the real number is significantly lower). So we need 3Mbps per account. How much does a Mbps cost? "Across key cities in the U.S. and Europe, 400 GigE prices range from $0.07 to $0.08 per Mbps."

Peacock doesn't even offer 4K most of the time or on the olympics, but for services that do a $1 upcharge should be more than enough to cover the bandwidth difference.

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

#288

Post by buzer » Wed, Feb 05, 2025, 9:07 PM UTC

hathawsh wrote: post #273

cogman10 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm willing to modify the bet to "Just one person does all the labor with AI as the primary tool". What I meant by "completely done by AI" is that AI is doing the vast majority of the heavy lifting. Sound, visuals, script and ultimately humans are just acting as the director of that AI. In otherwords, a masterpiece of cinema created by one person and AI prompts. Masterpiece being judged by the above success criteria.…

Is there such a thing as a "HN Vote" post? Because this would be a great vote to put on the front page. The question would be "How much of the production will AI be doing in the movie/TV industries in 10 years?" and these would be the choices: 1) Everything. A single prompt will generate a full-length, high quality movie. 2) One person will be able to spend a few weeks or months to produce a high quality movie using…

https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll

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

#289

Post by echelon » Wed, Feb 05, 2025, 9:07 PM UTC

almostdeadguy wrote: post #248

echelon wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This already happens without AI, it's just that studios can only produce so many films given the budget, labor, and time constraints. Tell me that any of the "Jurassic Park" films beyond the first were necessary. Or the "Lord of the Rings" films and shows beyond the original trilogy. These are products of the classical studio system. They keep trying to remake "Back to the Future" and as soon as Zemeckis dies, they'l…

Seems like we should have seen these groundbreaking creative works that have been totally inaccessible to create without AI by now rather than a million "X as a Wes Anderson Movie" trailers. Filmmaking has not been an inaccessible creative endeavor since like the 1910s. Budget price cameras have been with us for a long time. It's a weird AI company invention to suggest there are people who've been shut out of this pu…

You've got the cart before the horse.

The technology has to exist first. The technology is first picked up by early adopters: hustlers, marketers, hypsters. Not by practicing professionals.

It takes time for the new tools to work their way into the creative field. It first gets pushback, then it happens a little, and then all at once.

We're still super early days into this tech. Give it more time and it'll be all-capable and everywhere.

The canary in the coal mine is all the young people playing with it.

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

#290

Post by recursive » Wed, Feb 05, 2025, 9:12 PM UTC

deelowe wrote: post #242

jmholla wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Judging from the clunky, buggy, nonsensical experiences on 2nd tier streaming services (i.e., everything except Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Disney+, Max) With the exception of Netflix, these other companies' apps are similarly buggy and painful to use. I run into an at least issue daily (usually multiple times a day) in every streaming app I use except Netflix.

I LOATHE peacock. I don't know what checks they do at the start of the stream, but they always peg me at 720p or lower resolution despite having over 300mb. Its not an issue on any other streaming app and they give you no option to set it manually. Streams look like a dog's breakfast on my 4k TVs.

Could be a DRM thing. You might not have a trusted display/decoding device, so it gives you the low res.