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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?

#401

Post by DonHopkins »

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,…

Maybe this means they just fired a decent Engineering+Product+Test team.

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

#402

Post by DonHopkins »

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.

And incredibly badly designed. Like not supporting type-ahead, so after you hit -> to skip ahead, you have to wait until it streams the next 10 seconds of video to skip over, before hitting -> to skip ahead the next 10 seconds. Forces people to pirate content just so they can view it in vlc.

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

#403

Post by ghaff »

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…

I've always assumed there was a lot more "more trouble [i.e. time/money] than it's worth" associated with putting up old content in whatever form. As you say, there are a lot of potential complexities and figuring those out for something that is never going to bring in much revenue may not be worth it, however fervent some niche fan base may be.

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

#404

Post by xnorswap »

jzb wrote: post #331
vanderZwan wrote: post #51

> Anyway, Waiting for Guffman still holds up, and you can watch it on YouTube, for free. On top of that it never was released outside of the US before! As a European fan of Spinal Tap I'm quite excited to finally be able to see this film. Also: no mention of The Mission, which is also in the list? That's quite a critically acclaimed one. Just look at these opening paragraphs from its wikipedia page: > The Mission is…

1986 qualifies as “old movies” now? Time to fill out that AARP paperwork…

Would you have considered a 1947 movie as an "Old movie" in 1986?

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

#405

Post by flkenosad »

jampekka wrote: post #272
jmholla wrote: post #217

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.

Gotta love how streaming torrents through shady debrid and indexing services with Stremio is a smoother experience than what these megacorporations with massive budgets manage to scrape together.

Shout out to all the devs who never sold their souls.

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

#406

Post by CraigRood »

ghaff wrote: post #403
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…

I've always assumed there was a lot more "more trouble [i.e. time/money] than it's worth" associated with putting up old content in whatever form. As you say, there are a lot of potential complexities and figuring those out for something that is never going to bring in much revenue may not be worth it, however fervent some niche fan base may be.

I don't have any expertise here but my assumption would be the studios have a better way to manage digital content and rights compared to previous. It could very well be they have content available, free of rights, that can be uploaded to YouTube for monetisation. As others have mentioned, there are effectively no hosting or bandwidth costs associated.

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

#407

Post by DanielHB »

lillecarl wrote: post #326
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.

Yep. I worked for Viaplay, the Swedish streaming "giant". Viaplay chose to "sell out" to Akamai, Level3 and Amazon in return for less CDN staff. Viaplay went -95% a month after my intuition made me leave. The problem was that the more users used the platform the more the users cost, linearly. They limited many streams to 720, which is a joke in 2020s. Netflix has openconnect, essentially a CDN in every big ISPs netwo…

Damn man, what is going on at Viaplay now? My former team lead used to work there and went back after he left the place where we worked together.

This was my intuition as well, unless you are doing B2B (with billing proportional to the streaming) you have to do the hosting yourself.

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

#408

Post by ghaff »

CraigRood wrote: post #406
ghaff wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always assumed there was a lot more "more trouble [i.e. time/money] than it's worth" associated with putting up old content in whatever form. As you say, there are a lot of potential complexities and figuring those out for something that is never going to bring in much revenue may not be worth it, however fervent some niche fan base may be.

I don't have any expertise here but my assumption would be the studios have a better way to manage digital content and rights compared to previous. It could very well be they have content available, free of rights, that can be uploaded to YouTube for monetisation. As others have mentioned, there are effectively no hosting or bandwidth costs associated.

I'm sure they've got more mature systems in place today. But there's still some threshold of income vs. effort at any company. I freely admit to having no idea what that threshold looks like for a lot of old content--a lot of which was never digitized--at various studios.

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

#409

Post by lillecarl »

DanielHB wrote: post #407
lillecarl wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. I worked for Viaplay, the Swedish streaming "giant". Viaplay chose to "sell out" to Akamai, Level3 and Amazon in return for less CDN staff. Viaplay went -95% a month after my intuition made me leave. The problem was that the more users used the platform the more the users cost, linearly. They limited many streams to 720, which is a joke in 2020s. Netflix has openconnect, essentially a CDN in every big ISPs netwo…

Damn man, what is going on at Viaplay now? My former team lead used to work there and went back after he left the place where we worked together. This was my intuition as well, unless you are doing B2B (with billing proportional to the streaming) you have to do the hosting yourself.

I don't know much anymore, I know they run more ads than content and that they're running very lean. A lot of people had to go when the stock tanked. I have some conspiracy theory that "they" wiped the stock harder than deserved to be able to buy back ownership on the cheap...

I had to deal with Viaplay HR recently to get some documents out, took a month to get ahold of someone who could do it...

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

#410

Post by 1oooqooq »

flkenosad wrote: post #405
jampekka wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gotta love how streaming torrents through shady debrid and indexing services with Stremio is a smoother experience than what these megacorporations with massive budgets manage to scrape together.

Shout out to all the devs who never sold their souls.

except all those "consumer friedly" torrent things are the definition of selling one's soul.
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