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25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

latenighter.com

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Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate comments like this. This is Hacker News, we are highly tech educated and wealthy on average. I specced a 71 TB usable array that can survive losing 3 of 8 drives. $2000. (shucked drives, but this includes the server and ECC) If the data is invaluable, throw down a couple of these at homes of friends and family.

I have 10 x 20 TiB volumes, software RAID6, across multiple storage arrays. I wrote my comment from experience. I still don't consider it "cheap" even though I make a good chunk of change like many on this website, but I think this is because I think in terms of what my friends & family could afford.

You can get a 12TB HDD for a couple hundred dollars. What do you consider cheap?

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#292

This is complete incompetence from their leadership who show no value to their own content. They could have easily auctioned off/sold very old content to someone else but that kind of thinking would be beyond their competency. It's no wonder they go in such huge losses despite of having loyal audience and monopoly over unparalleled content. To this day I cannot get over the fact that there are literally millions docu…

They could have easily auctioned off/sold very old content to someone else.. That assumes they own the exclusive rights to the content. A lot of media has many rights holders (writers, music, etc), and you need to get them all to agree a sale or waive their right in order to sell. That could be expensive because it's involve lots and lots of lawyers. For a bunch of old comedy clips it might not make any commercial se…

Comedy is especially problematic. You have a standup show with lots of comedians and a band. Just imagine the IP interests.

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#293
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think you’re entitled to other people’s work?

It’s copy right. Not author right. The exclusive ability to copy is granted as a conceit. The restriction only came about because publishers got mad.

It came about because archives wanted a de jure monopoly on top of their de facto monopoly.

US copyright law took a very different path though.

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same story with the original Star Wars films. Lucas remastered and changed the originals, and you can mostly only get the original versions on VHS.

Playing devil's advocate, it's the artists' content. Don't they have the right to go back and make it more in line with their original vision?

Let them make a new version if they want, sure, but removing access to the original is what rankles.

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#295
post #75

Could they just have uploaded these to YouTube and monetized there through ads? Might not go with their brand, but better than deleting!

Youtube Ad revenue isn't what it used to be.... Its why so many creators do "baked-in" ads, patron, merch and memberships. A channel i follow getting <500k views a week calls ad revenue a rounding error in the grand scheme of things now.

One of my favorite food Youtuber Internet Shaquille just did an experiment where he released a short every day for a month and his AdSense revenue grew from $1500 to $7000 per month. Clearly Google is herding a lot of eyeballs and money over to Shorts to try and become a proper TikTok competitor.

Would recommend the video where he digs into the experiment, https://youtu.be/uvu3SDigoMA

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#296
post #47

Could they just have uploaded these to YouTube and monetized there through ads? Might not go with their brand, but better than deleting!

You do realize YouTube is one of their main threats, and their main advantage over YouTube is higher quality? Giving treasure trove of quality content to YouTube in exchange for peanuts while shuttering their own, that would be a double whammy.

Is it that different from Microsoft bringing their games to PlayStation and Sony bringing older games to PC. This would be the equivalent of making PS1 generation games available on PC.

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#297
post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These studios used to make ton of money because only a few are in town. Now, every teenager is his/her own studio and content pool is so vast that their revues must shrink. They have nowhere to run. I think their end state is to publish on YouTube/Netflix and continue living at fraction of revenue that they are used to. That's what they should prepare for and plan for. Their existence and importance was supported by…

I think their numbers are BS, just like Hollywood's numbers have always been BS. Remember when Lord of the Rings lost money for New Line somehow? Paramount's supposedly got 71,000,000 subscribers. At ~$10/month, they're making something like $8,500,000,000 / yr in subscriber fees. You gotta be daft to lose money on that. At like a $1,000,000 / episode (last numbers I heard, might be old) that's 8,500 episodes of tele…

No need to speculate, Paramount’s financials are public. And terrible.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/PARA/paramount-glo...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/PARA/paramount-glo...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/PARA/paramount-glo...

-2.8% annual return since Jan 2006, 4.25% annual return since Jun 2009, and their 5 and 10 year annual returns are way worse (dqdyj total return calculator doesn’t even provide a percentage return).

Meanwhile, SP500 is returning 10%+ per year.

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#298

We're going to lose so much more cultural history to corporate greed in the next century. Preservation of music, media, games are all being attacked in the name of profits. Future generations will not be able to enjoy the vast wealth we're creating because folks would rather destroy it than make it available for distribution, even for a fee.

You're overestimating how much people will care. When was the last time you listened to Bing Crosby other than White Christmas?

To an extent that's the fundamental issue driving these changes. It becomes increasingly difficult to monetize old material for lack of demand. Should lack of attention from society be enough reason to throw old media into the trash permanently? I don't believe so. We owe it to future generations to preserve what we can.

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC a part of copyright "activating" is publishing the content in the first place, so I don't think GP would have a good case to begin with, not that it matters.

Copyright does not require public publishing of the content — just "fixed in a tangible medium of expression". This would have been accomplished when the painting was created on paper.

This is essentially what I was referring to in the second sentence. Even under the current system you might theoretically have a claim, in practice you'd have a hell of a time proving it, so it wouldn't tangibly change the outcomes like OP is suggesting.

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playing devil's advocate, it's the artists' content. Don't they have the right to go back and make it more in line with their original vision?

Let them make a new version if they want, sure, but removing access to the original is what rankles.

Exactly, I'm not going to argue that artists don't have the right to re-release their material. It's the destruction of the original that to me is unconscionable.

Imagine this in a historical context, what if the publisher of Poe or Hemingway just decided to burn all their manuscripts and stop publishing because it was a better tax write off than their accountants though they would make on the lifetime sales of the work.

Because this is exactly what we are doing to future generations, lighting art on fire.

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