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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?

#361

Post by acomjean »

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…

My cousin worked at a major network porting programs for rebroadcast (they did some minor updates). They got surprised when a few shows they posted on YouTube got some traction (they became news worthy), getting a decent numbers of views and a check appeared..

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

#362

Post by linsomniac »

Retric wrote: post #192
mrandish wrote: post #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…

Most things are on Amazon if you’re willing to pay for them individually. It’s more buffet style streaming services that splintered. Per movie may seem expensive, but at the low end of hours per month watch time streaming services are a bad deal.

I had thought that, until recently I went to watch Spinal Tap with my son, and it's not apparently on Prime Video, even for pay. Which is odd, because I'm pretty sure I previously "bought" it there.

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

#363

Post by Uehreka »

TuringNYC wrote: post #203
SteveNuts wrote: post #71

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.

>> 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,…

Yeah, “a decent video player” feels like something that should be table-stakes commodity stuff, there are certainly a fair number of good open source video player components and toolkits with customizable skins and support for tons of playback formats and protocols. But no, this is actually something billion dollar companies struggle with.

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

#364

Post by 827a »

bluedevil2k wrote: post #31
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.

The only 2 companies that made money during the “streaming wars” were Netflix, which had the infrastructure in place already and didn’t need to build anything from scratch, and Sony, which decided not to build any streaming service and just license all its content out. Seems WBD is following the lead of a winner. * https://www.yahoo.com/tech/sony-succeeded-becoming-powerful-...

Much like Spotify; it took them many, many years to achieve only a 7% profit margin. Meanwhile, UMG runs at 16%.

The only company that actually makes good money from being a content middleman is, somehow, YouTube. I don't know how they do it. YouTube is among the greatest businesses in human history.

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

#365

Post by canucker2016 »

bena wrote: post #47

I love this. It's been ages since I've seen "Oh God" or "Hot to Trot". Not great movies, not genre or culture defining, but fine. These are movies I'd watch if they were on. I hope they do more. And I hope other distributors follow suit. Basically, I want Critters 1-3.

wikipedia page for "Hot to Trot", besides Bobcat Goldthwait, has Virginia Madsen, Dabney Coleman, and the voice of John Candy.

Released in that dead zone known as late august, in 1988.

0, zero, null!!!, percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. 22/100 on Metacritic.

Nominated for 5 Razzies - of course, they didn't "win" any.

Don't think I've ever seen it on TV.

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

#366

Post by canucker2016 »

fullshark wrote: post #55
rwmj wrote: 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/ )

Michael Caine's quote about Jaws 4 is similarly great: "I have never seen the film, but by all accounts it was terrible. However I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific."

from the Hot To Trot Wikipedia page:

"In an interview in 2011, Bobcat Goldthwait said that he got the script for Hot to Trot and wrote "Why would I do this?" on the cover, to which his manager responded by writing a dollar sign"

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

#368

Post by GauntletWizard »

iancmceachern wrote: post #340
m_ppp wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They put a strike on you because they had the film themselves and were claiming copyright? Were you putting up those films just as a public good service or was it for something else?

I was putting them up in good faith as a public service. Yes, they did. But when I pointed out that they didn't in fact own the copyright they highlighted this detail about the youtube terms if service, so I still had to take the video down, not because it violated copyright, but because it violated the YouTube terms of service.

Which part of the Youtube terms of service did it violate?

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

#369

Post by inemesitaffia »

aidenn0 wrote: post #123
scarab92 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't let the cloud providers fool you. Bandwidth is cheap, especially for Googles, Netflixes and Cloudflares of the world which peer with every ISP that matters.

Is Comcast still charging content providers and CDNs for peering?

Yes.

And peering with Comcast is almost the same price and transit.

deutsche telekom, Telstra and the Korean Telcos also do this.

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

#370

Post by inemesitaffia »

n_plus_1_acc wrote: post #89
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…

South Park has been available on their website free to stream with ads.

Used to be completely free
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