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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?

#351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, YouTube fully supports region specific availability and has for a very very long time.

Yes however, the original broadcast contracts may not have clauses in them for streaming services so having to revisit those contracts would be a costly process.

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

#352
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 didn't take them this long. Several studios have done this for years. Paramount literally did it more than a decade ago. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/...

I'm not so sure Paramount are doing it anymore, though. The link in that article leads to Paramount Scares which just has some clips and some rent-or-buy movies.

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

#353
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Who does 6Mbps for 1080p? I thought HD topped out at 3Mbps, and 4K was around the 6+Mbps

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

#354
post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you behind a CG-NAT? Not all companies have caught up to the fact that one IP is used by multiple customers now. Things like throttling by IP Address which used to be a viable option is not effective anymore.

Don't think so. Does cgnat use private IP space? I'm not familiar with how it works.

Sorta. It's like NAT except it's at your carrier. Multiple customers share the same IP.

If an attack or abuse comes from a CG-NAT address they have to throttle the IP and all the customers behind it.

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

#355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What device are you using? I use Apple TVs, and Apple TV+ is consistently extremely high quality streaming for me. YouTube is incredibly painful to use because their tvOS UI is garbage. Quality's OK, though.

I'm using an Apple TV (device) to stream Apple TV (the streaming service.) Streaming quality is great, so agree on that. It is the bugginess of the app. For example, with the Apple TV native remote, the silly touchpad is super clunky, painfully lacking the exponential fast forwarding i'm so used to with better services. The experience with the Samsung remote is very buggy. For example, when the "Dismiss" or "Skip" bu…

Honestly I turned the touchpad off within a few minutes of getting my Apple TV

When I got my second I decided to try again and that lasted all of five minutes.

I love my Apple TV otherwise (well after that and making the home button a home button instead of an Apple TV+ button!)

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

#356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I guess that’s the interesting thing - where are the normally litigious studios? Tinfoil hat time – I’ve noticed these shorts cropping up from shows which are about to be re-released on Netflix…

Then that's not tinfoil bat that's just "oh they had a small marketing budget"

Sure but it’d be kind of weird if they chose to launder it through all these spammy accounts instead of doing it above board. I guess it’s more effective this way though. They get more reach than they would from their single obviously branded account, and as the rightsholder they know they won’t get any (valid) DMCA complaints. And at the end of the day, Google has no reason to care and users are happy. Sure it’d be nice if the clips didn’t have annoying background music but that’s the tax we pay to algorithmic incentives…

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

#357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Who does 6Mbps for 1080p? I thought HD topped out at 3Mbps, and 4K was around the 6+Mbps

Twitch is typically 6Mbps+ and 1080p, though with more time to encode you can get the same quality out of fewer bits. Netflix can go up to about 20Mbps for 4K if my searches can be believed, but I didn't test it myself. When I've grabbed videos off Nebula they're a lot bigger than youtube; one here that doesn't even have much motion is 4Mbps at 1080p. And crunchyroll has a lot of 8Mbps at 1080p.

But acceptable quality can definitely go smaller. Especially if "acceptable" is judged by the significant compression artifacts I see on actual cable TV all the time.

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

#358
I think it does two things:

1. It puts these otherwise worthless movies to work and earns some ad revenue even if it is peanuts

2. There is always the chance a clip goes inexplicably viral on social and suddenly finds new relevance to the point that someone does want to pay money for it.

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

#359

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.

Their 'seek' behavior is also horrendous. IIRC they don't support the standard "click to skip forward 10 seconds" behavior and instead it's either in fast-forward mode or it's not, and in that mode it's impossible to seek to an accuracy of ~1 minute.

Video player controls have been a solved problem for something like several decades. It's actually impressive that they managed to screw it up so badly.

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