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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?

#441

Post by eptcyka »

al_borland wrote: post #422
eptcyka wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don’t disagree with you, but the original commentor posed the qeustion Why don’t indie film producers choose to premier on YouTube?.

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

#442

Post by toast0 »

bobbob1921 wrote: post #436
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.…

I can imagine that the DRM part is a difficult problem, however, why is DRM so important and require so much focus? I ask as the end goal of protecting the content is meaningless as I’ve yet to see content that does NOT end up on Pirate sites in perfect quality. (so why put so much effort into drm if it’s going to end up on pirate sites anyway.). Especially if DRM is causing UI issues or slowing down the experience.…

> however, why is DRM so important and require so much focus?

Because the content owners demand it. No content = no customers. You could probably build out a public domain streaming service, if you really wanted to build out a non-DRM streaming platform, but it's going to be hard to find customers for that too, I'd imagine.

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

#444

Post by Dylan16807 »

psytrancefan wrote: post #400
cogman10 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mas…

> The ratings is because of what the fame David Lynch achieved after making this.

Okay, so that's a risk of false positive success. It doesn't mean the bet is pointless, just that it's not the ultimate metric.

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

#445

Post by xorcist »

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,…

I blame modern software development methodologies which value feature pushing and ceremonies above well working basic functionality.

Look at something like the CCC video streaming site. Hyper focused on its thing, works wonders, developed entirely by volunteers with the help of academia.

If volunteers can do something on a shoestring budget, why can't Disney or Amazon with close to unlimited budgets approach even a fraction of the usability?

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

#446

Post by mulderc »

throwaway287391 wrote: post #327
lostlogin wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I laughed. Netflix 4K is some bs in my experience. A 4K file of the same show, pirated, is vastly better quality. Whatever they do to it is just vandalism.

IME Netflix is a close 2nd best after Apple, which I don't think I can distinguish from a 4K BluRay. I've found that the quality depends on the platform a little -- for Netflix the native LG app seems to look best on my LG TV, while Apple looks best on the Apple TV app (perhaps unsurprisingly). Amazon Prime 4K HDR on the other hand looks like garbage on every platform I've used -- the compression is unbearable in any…

I would put Disney+ after apple. Both AppleTV+ and Disney+ consistently looks great to me. Netflix is strange as it generally looks good but whatever compression they use does something funny to the picture which makes it look fuzzy and sharp at the same time to me.

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

#447

Post by mulderc »

thawkth wrote: post #355
TuringNYC wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using an Apple TV (device) to stream Apple TV (the streaming service.) Streaming quality is great, so agree on that. It is the bugginess of the app. For example, with the Apple TV native remote, the silly touchpad is super clunky, painfully lacking the exponential fast forwarding i'm so used to with better services. The experience with the Samsung remote is very buggy. For example, when the "Dismiss" or "Skip" bu…

Honestly I turned the touchpad off within a few minutes of getting my Apple TV When I got my second I decided to try again and that lasted all of five minutes. I love my Apple TV otherwise (well after that and making the home button a home button instead of an Apple TV+ button!)

I don't get this, I love the touchpad on the Apple TV, makes using it so much nicer than anything else I have tried.

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

#448

Post by Dylan16807 »

kelnos wrote: post #216
spratzt wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely agree. It’s also a silly to believe that because it’s old it’s culturally significant. There’s plenty of ancient dross in the back catalogues.

"Culturally significant" is the wrong metric, and shows that you don't really understand why people watch what they watch. People watch all sorts of things, from all different time periods, because they enjoy them. Sometimes those things are "culturally significant", but I'd expect that's not the most common case. Sometimes those things are B-movies from the '70s or brain-candy sitcoms from the '90s.

> because they enjoy them

The premise is that there is so much good AI content that if you just pick something you enjoy, no other criteria, 90% of the time it'll be an AI work.

The only people that would be watching a significant amount of older work are the people that have a reason beyond that.

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

#449

Post by mfrommil »

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,…

>> I'd say the biggest cost is probably hiring a decent Engineering+Product+Test team

Part of it is cost, but a lot is culture and leadership. Streaming (especially live) is one of the toughest areas to maintain a good user experience. I've led Streaming Product teams for years. Product teams almost always needs to deliver growth, which comes in the form of new features, monetization, and other changes. But the user cares most about the core experience - did the video start playing without a delay? Were there buffering issues? Audio playback out of sync? Issues are very noticeable, and sometimes very difficult to test proactively for. Product needs to find this balance, and can not go 100% all in on growth and neglect the not sexy stuff. If the whole Product/Engineering/Test org is not aligned on stability/QoE being a top priority, it can degrade very quickly after a few releases for a streaming app.

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

#450

Post by ghaff »

VTimofeenko wrote: post #435
CraigRood wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Inb4: not my area of expertise, but I worked with a company that was providing data on movie rights. The way I understand it is that it's a Cartesian explosion of complexity under the hood. There are at least rights to a version of the movie and the soundtrack/theme song. They can function independently in a region and are granted exclusively or non-exclusively in a region based on timing. As a bit of a contrived exa…

There have been one or two very popular TV series (e.g. Northern Exposure) that the owners were able to eventually get the music rights sorted on. But I'm sure there are a gazillion random TV shows that a handful of people care about for some nostalgic reason that no one is going to go to the trouble to work out.
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