Live data from Hacker News

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

tedium.co

91–100 of 485 posts

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

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indie film makers release a lot of their work on youtube.

There hasn't really been a Blair Witch Project movie happening on Youtube yet...

I get that the real issue isn't just YouTube, but that no other horror film, or otherwise, has really matched Blair Witch Project's combination of impact, marketing success, micro-budget, and cultural phenomenon.

I just speculate that if Blair Witch Project were made today, it would likely debut on a platform like YouTube before gaining wider recognition.

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

#92

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.

> Building a streaming service is pretty expensive.. It's not. At least not for companies of that size. There is PeerTube for that: https://joinpeertube.org/ . It can even decrease the load to your servers by spreading the trafic over peers.

Creating and running a (direct to consumer) profitable streaming service takes a lot more than just “infrastructure”.

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

#93

> 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…

I discovered the Mission through an Ennio Morricone playlist, and didn't regret it.

Not a religious person but it made me aware of who the Jesuits were and read up on them. Truly a fascinating part of the Catholic Church, they're like crack Navy Seals in religious terms, or 10x engineers of the Vatican :)

I sometimes program whilst listening to "Gabriel's Oboe" on repeat for hours and hours

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OIna_nXFxM

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

#94
post #6

Oh nice they got The Science of Sleep (2006) on here, great film with Gael García Bernal by Michel Gondry. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAyg_ENvHzc

Saw that in the theater, and remembered liking it quite a bit. May have to watch it again. I recall the animation was quite impressive.

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

#96

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.

Don't let the cloud providers fool you. Bandwidth is cheap, especially for Googles, Netflixes and Cloudflares of the world which peer with every ISP that matters.

Yeah and that is their point. And it's actually highly problematic just how much discount the large giants get on traffic - it effectively blocks any competitors not backed by some very deep pockets.

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

#97
post #78

Now if only whoever owns the rights (Fox? Disney?) would follow suit and drop the old Fox TV catalog (Herman's Head. Whoops!, Parker Lewis Can't Lose) on youtube so I could rewatch the shows I loved as a kid, but never stream anywhere.

The problem might be music rights clearance if they used a lot of contemporary music from actual artists.

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

#99

The full list: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7Eup7JXScZyvRftA2Q5h...

Mr. Nice Guy has 15M views so far. I don't know what that comes out to in ad revenue, but it seems like maybe this was a good idea. Most of the others don't have anywhere near this, though.

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

#100
post #15

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.

I'm surprised a lot of things aren't more accessible. So much content not making money / available ANYWHERE. I assume, that maybe the amount of difficulty in terms of getting permission is too high to bother so nobody does?

At a finer grain than general "permission", a lot of the issue is with the music. For many pre-streaming movies, the original soundtrack will have been licensed in a way that supported resale but didn't foresee streaming. Making those movies available for streaming would involve tracking down the copyright holders for every piece of music (often the estates or successors of the original composer, but often non-determinate) and renegotiating a licensing deal.
Post reply on HN