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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?

#391

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.

The UK Channel4 app can't even get the ratio right for whole series of some programs. (Programs that were 4:3 but they warp it the wrong way, and still have big black bars at the margins {I think it's called overscan?})

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

#393
post #205
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d like to note that older movies have often been “live streamed” in an ad-supported format for many decades. You were even able to use your own equipment to “download” these movies to local “storage” and keep a collection with enough determination. The resolution was often terrible, somewhere around 240i and 360i. /s

> The resolution was often terrible, somewhere around 240i and 360i. It's gotten better, though! The digitization of broadcast TV added a bunch of new channels, which are in HD. They have decimal channel numbers.

I was referring to VHS recording which is limited to less-than-broadcast resolutions.

DVD and HDD PVRs for analog broadcasts did capture at 480i but were wildly expensive.

Subchannels are an interesting concept, but suffer from compression loss from packing in multiple streams into a single 6 MHz slice that would otherwise be a single channel.

Don’t get me started on the fact that we are limited at 1080i as well.

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

#394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With AI, this entire vast content library is about to be worthless anyway. We'll be making more long-form, quality content per month than entire Hollywood production years. And if you include short form content and slop, it'll be more content per second than entire years. When faced with infinite content, people will reach for content currently popular in the zeitgeist or content that addresses niche interests. Holly…

Thanks, I hate it. Can you point me to any examples of AI-generated content that's actually worth reading/watching/listening to?

There was a Mario Brothers music video set in a swampy trailer park, actually watched that to the end.

Couldn't work out if this channel is the creator but there a bunch of them - https://m.youtube.com/@demonflyingfox/videos

If the singing is ML-generated then I think that's pretty impressive too.

Looks like the channels started out as still images with Ken Burns Effect only 2 years ago. That's some progress.

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

#395

YouTube playlist with the movies https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7Eup7JXScZyvRftA2Q5h...

surprisingly not that many

There is a huge amount more available on the channel than what is on the linked play list.

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

#396

There is an increasing amount of UK TV uploaded to YouTube from whoever owns the rights. Have seen The Bill (26 seasons) and pretty much all of Gordon Ramsey's work recently (including a 8hr entire season video). ITV appears to have even created the brand "Our Stories" for their YouTube fly on the wall telly content. Much of this not-fantastic-quality TV could probably be easily found on YouTube even without the righ…

Channel 4's been doing it too, in fact absolutely loads of their shows are on YouTube now and they do it as a weekly release, so for example last week they posted the first episode of "Celebrity Hunted" season 6, and then a week later episode 2, etc.

Take a look at their playlists to see what I mean, tons of stuff: https://www.youtube.com/@Channel4/playlists

They've also got other channels, eg you can watych most of grand designs over here: https://www.youtube.com/@Channel4Homes/playlists

Guessing they realised its more profitable to use someone elses bandwidth and run ads.

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

#397

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.

I'm surprised that there isn't a standardized open source web video player which all websites use so users have the same video player experience and features across the web. Usually commercial or "free" video players are bad like JW player or whatever freemium players there are.

There are open source HTML players tho but they are not as powerful and feature rich as YouTube player.

I remember watching IGN gaming videos on their website's player and the experience was horrible. Tbh idk what's the best open source video player out there right now.

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

#398
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.

When it was fairly recent. Maybe a year or two out of theaters

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

#399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are the little guys receiving royalties from these movies decades later? I recall instances where actors paid some of the little guys out of their own pocket to keep movies going, Deadpool is an example of this.

Yes, I'm pretty sure they do.

That really depends, as the studios have some tricks up their sleeves, like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

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

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By a whisker, I would bet you're right. But only because of your clause 'completely done by AI'. And I think that renders the bet kind of irrelevant. I would also bet that sometime in the next 10 years, we'll have a masterpiece of cinema on our hands where the heavy lifting (visuals, sound, even screenwriting) was largely done by an AI, helpfully nudged and curated at important moments by human experts. Or, by just o…

I'm willing to modify the bet to "Just one person does all the labor with AI as the primary tool". What I meant by "completely done by AI" is that AI is doing the vast majority of the heavy lifting. Sound, visuals, script and ultimately humans are just acting as the director of that AI. In otherwords, a masterpiece of cinema created by one person and AI prompts. Masterpiece being judged by the above success criteria.…

The bet is stupid.

David Lynch The Grandmother would be considered a "masterpiece" by this definition.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4y0rYWVcxF4

Anyone could make something along those lines right now with AI tools. The ratings is because of what the fame David Lynch achieved after making this.

AI video is going to stall bad because it is just too expensive and what we have now is complete trash. Sora is such a massive disappointment to anyone who was interested in doing exactly what is being described.

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