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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?

#311

Post by MartinMcGirk »

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…

Actually it seems like region-specific copyright deals are still very much in play. If I visit that playlist from Australia then 14 of the full movies are unavailable and hidden. But VPN'ing through the US shows me the whole set.

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

#312

Post by lotsofpulp »

jandrese wrote: post #250
com2kid wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Warner Bros didn't buy out Discovery, other way around really. In return for taking on loads of debt, Discovery got ownership of WB. HBO Max was an incredibly lean org, around 200-300 engineers at launch, 1/10th the size of its competitors but we launched a similar scaled service (tens of millions of domestic users, followed up by international launches one after another). IMHO once COVID ended and HBO Max just becam…

Max has gone to crap since the merger though. They cancelled a lot of the quality content and added a bunch of cheap and awful crap like reality shows to the service. It's like someone bought a Rolls Royce and riced it out.

It was ATT that fired all the old HBO bosses that curated for quality. They just dumped their failed experiment onto Discovery to squeeze out whatever was left.

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

#314

Post by TuringNYC »

Mindwipe wrote: post #294
Suppafly wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why do you think Netflix wants to buy it? There is no point buying everything as a streaming provider. It doesn't get you more customers and it costs money. Heck, Apple will not even let you put up anything on the iTunes store to purchase - they have to be very confident it will recoup their costs for encoding, ingest time etc etc.

>> There is no point buying everything as a streaming provider. It doesn't get you more customers and it costs money.

The way Amazon prime does it is much like a traditional cable provider -- you can opt into channels (e.g., Hallmark channel) for additional fees per month. Everything purchased appears on Amazon as a universal bucket of content, same UI same everything. Amazon appears to handle the tech and billing. As a consumer, it is beautiful -- you can subscribe and unsubscribe from services monthly, rather than waiting for some once-every-3-yrs renewal contract. You can do everything online rather than waiting an hour for customer service. And thank heavens you dont need to install some random half-baked streaming "App" via the Samsung TV App store.

I'm assuming Amazon takes a cut of the monthly fee. If the MRR of the monthly cut Amazon gets is higher than the cost to deliver, it is a first order win. I assume the marginal engineering work is trivial. I also assume the only marginal costs are the extra metered cost of bandwidth, storage, etc.

I do think there is an issue though -- if the cost of the bundler (Amazon in this case) gets too high, I can see consumers scared off by this ever-increasing bill (Imagine you had a $50/mo netflix bill for example.) Of course, for Amazon this isnt a problem since practically every human I know has a load of random Amazon Marketplace charges on their credit card already they cannot reconcile anyway.

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

#315

Post by wbl »

taurknaut wrote: post #263
richiebful1 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the Protestants had the printing press and significant political support on their side

Luther also showed up just as the HRE's centralization was beginning to show major major cracks. Luther wasn't the first "heretic" to challenge the catholic church, but he was the first one with major political support (a duke or a prince, I can't recall which).

There's also the Moravians and Lolards. Everyone knew Catholicism needed to change but it wasn't until the Reformation the pressure existed for the Counter-reformation to overcome the obstacles within the Catholic church.

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

#316

Post by HenryBemis »

I will go ahead and say that some of these movies were given 'for free' some years ago. In some countries, Sunday newspapers and/or magazines would come with a 'free' DVD. But they were never giving away the blockbusters, they would give away good movies, with good cast (e.g. Mission - De Niro).

So there are so many (hundreds? thousands?) of DVDs/copies floating out there, to the point that nobody would pay a fee to watch them.

I had a collection of those 'free' DVDs that came in newspapers/magazines. Some years back I 'ripped' them all (kept photos of the album with the DVDs as proof of ownership) and threw away (responsibly) hundreds of DVD disks. I have never watched any of them.

I do not believe that all these "views" listed are real.. "True stories", 29k views in 6 days?? Really?? I think people search for " full movie" and click on anything that comes up, as they search for some blockbuster/pirated movie.

And/or some people will click, use their InternetDownloadManager (or similar), download the 1080, save it, and never watch it.

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

#317

Post by kiwiguy1 »

I think this is a play on testing how the DRM of their catalog looks like. Looking through my mcn cms they have all the applicable claims on the content so they are possibly testing how many infringing videos are on YouTube as well as using all this content as a content funnel

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

#319

Post by paulddraper »

ldoughty wrote: post #188
paulddraper wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 out…

That's also true of Apple/Amazon/etc.

If you want to make money from a movie, that seems a much better option.

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

#320

Post by extraduder_ire »

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.

It's also the same channel they put their new trailers on, so the increased watch time should really help with getting their other videos recommended more.
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