Why is Warner Bros. Discovery putting old movies on YouTube? • Hacker News Board

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

#421

Post by lillecarl » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 3:40 PM UTC

DanielHB wrote: post #414

lillecarl wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Jeez that sucks, was it all due to the decision to offload streaming to 3rd parties? How could they not do any cost estimations? It must have been a huge project that lasted months.

Viaplay started as a side gig to Nordic Entertainment Group so they started in the cloud and never questioned the decision again, I also got the impression that leadership didn't trust the tech competency and they didn't hire to fix it either. CDN providers are arguably better at CDN than we were, but it's just so expensive.

Regarding why the company tanked, I think it was just a part of a bigger problem with inefficient operations, bloat and also going all-in investing in sports without acquiring enough customers.

The Viaplay app(s) are quite bad so people find other ways to watch what they want.

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

#422

Post by al_borland » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 3:45 PM UTC

eptcyka wrote: post #18

browningstreet wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a little surprised there isn't more of this. Building a streaming service is pretty expensive.. a lot of the platforms lost money doing so and really only made it back when they merged into an umbrella of other services. 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.

Movies are capital intensive, a movie is less likely to go viral than a video that is made to be viral. Thus, doing this is risky. Also, people wanting to create viral movies probably do not want to make viral videos.

These old movies have already made their money. Anything they can get now is just gravy.

It’s a Wonderful Life is popular because the copyright expired and TV stations could play it for free. Playing it so much got people to watch, and now it’s a classic. It bombed originally.

Putting old movies on YouTube gives them a chance at a second life, and the studio doing it, means they can still earn some money on something that would otherwise just sit in a vault somewhere.

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

#423

Post by specialist » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 3:50 PM UTC

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…

> ...soon pretty much all the old content will just be available on a central streaming service. The future will be good.

I'll buy a TV once any show ever made is available right now for $1 dollar.

During the '00s, I thought surely that'd be in the '10s. Oh well. The '30s aren't so far away.

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

#424

Post by lipitic » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 3:50 PM UTC

For those who are interested, Mosfilm has been uploading a bunch of Russian movies to YouTube for a long time.

You can watch Tarkovsky's movies, for example.

And one of my personal favorites - Kin-Dza-Dza! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYHv8eJrW2Y

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

#425

Post by 1oooqooq » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 3:50 PM UTC

jampekka wrote: post #411

1oooqooq wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In what sense? Leeching?

most of the clients are ripped off open source and sold for profit/subscription. and filled to the brim with trojans and adware.

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

#426

Post by Cthulhu_ » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 4:16 PM UTC

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.

If it's like a regular YT video and monetized as such, there's going to be regular ad breaks... which effectively makes it just like watching a film on cable TV, and I suspect the amount they would earn is similar. Although iirc a cable channel would pay a fixed amount for the syndication rights, then their profit would be from ads in turn, in this case the profits would go straight to the publisher after Youtube takes its cut.

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

#427

Post by neves » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 4:29 PM UTC

Very nice. Unfortunately no Brazilian Portuguese subtitles.

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

#428

Post by hedora » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 4:31 PM UTC

1oooqooq wrote: post #425

jampekka wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what sense? Leeching?

most of the clients are ripped off open source and sold for profit/subscription. and filled to the brim with trojans and adware.

Isn’t that the same as 99% of commercial phone apps?

(Not defending it; I’m just saying it compares favorably with whatever crap is in most non-pirate apps.)

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

#429

Post by hedora » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 4:37 PM UTC

prmoustache wrote: post #383

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.

> 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.

Yeah; of those, Netflix has been the second least reliable for me.

It is a bit better now.

I think part of the problem is their dumb microservices architecture. They operate something like 10,000 microservices and different devices talk to different subsets of those.

On our old, cheap roku stick, they regularly would produce “could not stream” errors or fallback to screenshots instead of trailers (which was actually better!) more often than not. The website would be fine, and no one else I know noticed the outages.

The worst thing is that I’ve worked at places that have moron middle managers that actually decided to emulate this and moved to microservices. It wasted years of my life at work.

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

#430

Post by hedora » Thu, Feb 06, 2025, 4:42 PM UTC

bb88 wrote: post #354

deelowe wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If it’s not a cgnat, your ISP could be throttling everyone that isn’t using a whitelisted site. Try using speedtest.net or fast.com just before streaming, and see if it fixes peacock.