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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?

#381

Post by drusenko »

echelon wrote: post #179
Frederation wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Art doesnt cease to be art when new forms of art are materializing. Its up to the viewer.

That wasn't the argument. The argument is that few will watch the majority of WB's back catalogue, because their time is being spent with all the other attention sinks. This places a monetary value on the content, not a social or cultural value.

I’m not sure compelling & bountiful AI films and interest in older films are mutually exclusive.

A flood of high quality AI content might devalue it as it becomes too normal, familiar or expected. In a strange way, this might reinvigorate interest in back catalogs.

Also, some content is truly timeless regardless of its production quality. Our kids have the world’s content at their disposal and their favorite is currently Tom & Jerry episodes from the 1960s. Go figure.

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

#382

Post by hulitu »

Epa095 wrote: post #373
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,…

Some years ago I worked for a company creating streaming platforms for media companies, aka the clunky shit you complain about:-) My experience the clunkyness comes primarily from two things. 1: Every customer wants their own twist. It is not enough to create an awesome video player app and reskin it, no they all want to be special. 2: Getting the last 5% takes twice as much work as the first 95%. Probably even more.…

> But for the best experience you want every video to start playing in less than a second.

Even Netflix and Disney+ do not have that. The TV also takes some time to respond.

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

#383

Post by prmoustache »

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,

Not sure where this come from, I have been unsubscribed for a few months so my experience is not current but back in mid 2024 I got video not showing up with some obscure error codes once in a while.

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

#384

Post by oangemangut »

Retric wrote: post #310
babypuncher wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like buying DRM-encumbered digital copies. I'm OK with streaming subscriptions because their catalogues are fundamentally ephemeral, but if I buy a movie I want to know I can keep it forever, even if the platform I bought it from disappears entirely. To that end, I only buy physical media that can be copied and have its DRM removed. On the plus side, Blu-Ray turns 20 next year and still provides better image…

I get you, but to be clear I was referring to renting movies rather than purchasing them. It’s not a service I use, but it’s surprisingly close to the anything anywhere anytime ideal.

we're trying to cut back to only Disney+ for kids and we use prime video for us. Amazon's genius "take this prime video credit for slow shipping" has us renting movies maybe once a week and it's much better value for us than all subscriptions services that get no playtime.

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

#385

Post by Epa095 »

hulitu wrote: post #382
Epa095 wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some years ago I worked for a company creating streaming platforms for media companies, aka the clunky shit you complain about:-) My experience the clunkyness comes primarily from two things. 1: Every customer wants their own twist. It is not enough to create an awesome video player app and reskin it, no they all want to be special. 2: Getting the last 5% takes twice as much work as the first 95%. Probably even more.…

> But for the best experience you want every video to start playing in less than a second. Even Netflix and Disney+ do not have that. The TV also takes some time to respond.

Netflix is superior to Disney+ in this regard (at least on my TV).

And on my TV Netflix manages sub-second (at least sometimes). IDK how. Maybe they somehow give me the DRM keys ahead of time? Maybe everything in the "continue watching" is pre-approved? Maybe the first couple of seconds are handled differently, maybe they are not DRM protected? Maybe the netflix intro logo thingy is cached locally, and then stuff happends in the background? It is after all more pleasant to hear the intro sound that watch a spinning loading-thingy. Maybe as I move the selection across stuff they pre-emptively fetch the first seconds? In some cases it also seems to start auto-playing in the background, so the only thing that happends when I press a selection is that the GUI overlay dissapears.

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

#386

Post by yurishimo »

827a wrote: post #364
bluedevil2k wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because YouTube has found a way to monetize the work of it's content creators. Online influencers are incentivized to make videos to get paid and YouTube has reduced their costs enough to make it worthwhile.

In addition to that, whenever users are just starting out, their videos still get ad rolls but the creator doesn't get any money. That's millions of new videos every day that Youtube can monetize until those creators are eligible to collect the checks for themself (if ever).

Also, YouTube does aggressive caching of very old videos that have very few views. You might need to wait 10 seconds for YT to fetch the video from cold storage before watching, but in the grand scheme of things, it's worth it to them.

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

#387

Post by yurishimo »

tart-lemonade wrote: post #109
jerf wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'm also a little surprised no one has yet (AFAIK) done the "viral indie release to Youtube" path. I feel like it's sitting there waiting to be exploited." There's a lot of "indies releasing things to YouTube directly". However, they're limited both by the algorithm and by the amount of money they can generate by that, so you get a fairly restricted set of genres that this can work with, like sketch comedy or (perha…

In a similar vein, I remember reading somewhere that creating shows for direct-to-streaming is liberating because, although it is quite similar to TV in that it's telling a story in chunks (usually 30 to 60 minutes) without a guarantee of continuation (renewal), you don't have the primary constraints of traditional television: fitting into a specific time slot, saving time for commercials, and creating hooks that lea…

You see this often with Apple TV+ shows. Some episodes are only 40~ minutes while the very next one might be 70. They can scope the episode to only include the content that is required for that story and extend the runtime when they need to include extra details or scenes to make everything flow nicely.

For most viewers, the discretion is worthwhile for better storytelling.

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

#388

Post by runevault »

Uehreka wrote: post #363
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,…

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.

Because the player is only the first step. Then you need all the other stuff like a CDN distribution to get it close enough to all your subscribers/able to handle all the subscribers pulling down video. I'd be shocked if the core player that just shows pixels on the screen is anyones' problem at this point.

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

#389

Post by vasco »

aurareturn wrote: post #81
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 don't think it's a "hit" for Google. They'll optimize ads to always ensure they make a profit from a view. It's a win/win.

Google laid fiber cables across the ocean, they already own the whole infrastructure and rent it out. It's a cost only in the sense that they potentially can't sell as much capacity as without their own traffic going down the pipes.

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

#390

Post by pbhjpbhj »

TuringNYC wrote: post #329
recursive wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>Could be a DRM thing. You might not have a trusted display/decoding device, so it gives you the low res. True, but that is why this is a hard engineering challenge -- there are a lot of variations on client-side devices which need to be supported well. Upgrade cycles for TVs is 3x that of phones, is my guess.

'That' being DRM?
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