Why Is Warner Brothers Discovery Dumping Old Movies On YouTube?
179 comments
·February 5, 2025lxgr
SteveNuts
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.
SllX
Ah, FAST services as referenced by the parent are an entire genre of streaming services that might have slipped under the radar for most Hacker News readers.[1] They’d be off my radar too since I’m not interested in them per se, but for Jason Snell’s excellent Downstream[2] podcast (earlier episodes co-hosted by Julia Alexander) covering basically the business of Hollywood with an emphasis on streaming services and rights.
So this is basically just using YouTube as a FAST service.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_ad-supported_streaming_te...
dylan604
YouTube serving content with ads would be more AVOD (on-demand with ads) vs FAST. FAST typically means a linear feed programmed to play specific content at specific time just like tuning into a channel on OTA or cable networks.
echelon
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. Hollywood never made Steampunk Vampire Hunters of Ganymede, but in the future there will be creators filling every void. There won't be much reason to revisit old catalogues that don't cater to modern audiences unless it's to satisfy curiosity.
There will be a few legacy titles that endure (Friends, Star Wars), but most of it will be washed away in a sea of infinite attention sinks.
We're about to hit post-scarcity, infinite attention satisfiability. We've already looked over the inflection point, so it doesn't take much imagination to reason what's next.
scarab92
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.
aidenn0
Is Comcast still charging content providers and CDNs for peering?
wbl
The reality of these relationships is more complex especially in some markets. It's also not hard to be at the IX and benefit yourself.
mschuster91
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.
vlan0
Bandwidth is a part, but that’s an easy hurdle. But running a CDN at that scale is gonna require experience and truck load of money. The juice really has to be worth the squeeze.
Similar to running on-prep vs cloud.
dylan604
> But running a CDN at that scale is gonna require experience and truck load of money
Take Netflix for example. Their CDN at scale is pretty good for VOD type of delivery, but they continue to get it wrong for live event streaming. Even Twit..er, X falls down with their large event live streaming.
Adding the "live" component makes everything just that much harder
DanielHB
There are B2B SaaS services for streaming content, you upload the file they host and stream it for you with some API integrations to restrict access.
Although I imagine they cost more than youtube's cut from ad-revenue.
dumbfounder
I agree with parent that the bigger issue is distribution. Installing random apps sucks. YouTube has distribution. If they can make more money off esoteric movies by using YouTube then that makes more sense than having an extremely long tail of content in your app that probably no one will discover.
aurareturn
I don't think it's a "hit" for Google. They'll optimize ads to always ensure they make a profit from a view. It's a win/win.
HDThoreaun
content is by far the biggest cost for running your own streaming service
dylan604
"good" content that people want to watch is by far the biggest cost. you can find content for pennies on the dollar, but your viewers will not make it worth the expense as no advertisers will want to spend money with your low viewer count
robertlagrant
It would be really nice if YouTube could give uploaders the ability to schedule ad slots, rather than them appearing randomly.
Unless they do this already and stuff I watch just does it badly, of course.
meithecatte
I'm pretty sure this is a feature that's available at least to big creators – I remember a Tom Scott video doing a bit involving scheduling an ad at a particularly fitting moment.
You might have to be a YouTube partner or something like that to make use of this stuff, though.
not2b
It appears that the intent of the ad scheduling is to be so annoying that it motivates people on the fence to pay for premium.
slongfield
Yeah, YouTube's UI lets you set where the ads go. The creator tools let you set how many, and where midroll ads will play. However, most creators just click the "insert automatically" button.
mrandish
> However, most creators just click the "insert automatically" button.
That seems like a good opportunity for a neural net feature that's smarter than simple scene cut detection. While most theatrical films lack many good spots for commercial breaks, there are certainly a lot of "less bad" spots. Sadly, I doubt YT will bother since they no longer seem to care about viewer experience in recent years.
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beretguy
> Youtube also shows ads
Not on my devices :)
tootie
Does YT offer more revenue than something like Tubi?
xattt
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
vanderZwan
> 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 a 1986 British historical drama film about the experiences of a Jesuit missionary in 18th-century South America.[4] Directed by Roland Joffé and written by Robert Bolt, the film stars Robert De Niro, Jeremy Irons, Ray McAnally, Aidan Quinn, Cherie Lunghi, and Liam Neeson.
> The film premiered in competition at the 39th Cannes Film Festival, winning the Palme d'Or. At the 59th Academy Awards it was nominated for seven awards including Best Picture and Best Director, winning for Best Cinematography. The film has also been cited as one of the greatest religious films of all time, appearing in the Vatican film list's "Religion" section and being number one on the Church Times' Top 50 Religious Films list.
Oh, and the score is by a certain Ennio Morricone.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IpNXw6Y05M&list=PL7Eup7JXSc...
tomaytotomato
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
wbl
What is the similarity between the Dominicans and the Jesuits?
Both were started to fight heresy: the Dominicans the Cathars, the Jesuits the Protestants. Both were started by soldiers. Both have unique spiritual disciplines.
What's the difference? Meet any Cathars lately?
bregma
Jesuits are usually ordained priests. Dominicans are usually not. The difference is black cassocks vs. white tunics.
richiebful1
To be fair, the Protestants had the printing press and significant political support on their side
cptnapalm
10 out of 10. Would guffaw again.
mrandish
> As a European fan of Spinal Tap I'm quite excited to finally be able to see this film.
You're in for a treat. While somewhat similar, Waiting for Guffman is a bit different than Spinal Tap. It has layers to the satire that are even more subtle. Not as many call back lines destined to live in memes forever (eg "It goes to eleven"). It's more of a character study that's willing to simply bask in the absolute vacuum of unself-awareness long enough to let it wrap back on itself and evolve into sincere charm. Eugene Levy is a treat as always and Fred Willard's performance evokes echoes of his legendary work on Fernwood Tonight.
shermantanktop
Waiting For Guffman is a great movie...Christopher Guest has done quite a few in this vein but IMO Guffman is the best.
zeristor
For some reason I thought the Eurythmics single "Missionary Man" which came about at the same time was the film tie in.
Mistletoe
This is wonderful news. My Waiting for Guffman dvd was lost at some point and I often open its case wanting to watch and remember again and get disappointed like Corky.
xhkkffbf
Certainly "The Mission" is a great film. Absolutely top notch. And with one of Morricone's better scores.
timmg
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.
bluedevil2k
The only 2 companies that made money during the “streaming wars” were Netflix, which had the infrastructure in place already and didn’t need to build anything from scratch, and Sony, which decided not to build any streaming service and just license all its content out. Seems WBD is following the lead of a winner.
* https://www.yahoo.com/tech/sony-succeeded-becoming-powerful-...
enragedcacti
Is it really following the lead of a winner if you started by building your own failing streaming service, then buying another streaming service and merging them, and only then starting to license out content?
mason55
Sure - that's why Sony is the winner. Other companies tried other things and lost. Now they see what the winner did and they're following their lead.
When WB started all this it wasn't clear what the winning strategy was going to be. Now that it is clearer, they're just following.
com2kid
Warner Bros didn't buy out Discovery, other way around really. In return for taking on loads of debt, Discovery got ownership of WB.
HBO Max was an incredibly lean org, around 200-300 engineers at launch, 1/10th the size of its competitors but we launched a similar scaled service (tens of millions of domestic users, followed up by international launches one after another).
IMHO once COVID ended and HBO Max just became a streaming destination instead of having movies "launched" on it, they'd be just fine in terms of profit (and indeed iirc the successor Max service is profitable). First releasing big block busters doesn't drive enough user growth to pay for the movie, but if you have an existing content pipeline then having a streaming service as another delivery platform becomes reasonable.
guyzero
Sony built Crackle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crackle_(service) but it's failed at this point.
browningstreet
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.
jerf
"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."
There's a lot of "indies releasing things to YouTube directly". However, they're limited both by the algorithm and by the amount of money they can generate by that, so you get a fairly restricted set of genres that this can work with, like sketch comedy or (perhaps a bit surprisingly to me) science documentaries, like Veritasium or Practical Engineering.
These are basically indie filmmakers doing a very indie thing that doesn't fit anywhere else.
Movies are, after all, as affected by their release technology as anything else. There's a reason they're all 80-130 minutes, and they have their own genre restrictions as a result of it, especially if you think of it in terms not just of binary possibility but how popular things are. It isn't reasonable to expect a very different distribution method to result in "movies" you'd recognize from the cinema any more than it is reasonable to expect that television would only ever have run "movies" and never developed its own genres that don't work in cinema. Taking into account the need for the content to match its distribution there's a ton of indie stuff on YouTube. What I would say you are really seeing is the restrictiveness of "The Algorithm", and that is an interesting question to ponder on its own.
btown
Part of this is that YouTube makes this viable only for creators whose inbound viewers are likely to stay to watch a majority of the content; otherwise, the algorithm penalizes your content for every "bounce." A comedy short that'll attract people who like comedy shorts, and will be over before many people bounce? A long-form science documentary that's likely only going to be clicked by someone who wants to watch a long-form science documentary? Both meet this criterion. But any kind of traditional filmmaking with longer character arcs will be penalized, and that's a really hard thing to see for your creation's primary distribution channel.
tart-lemonade
In a similar vein, I remember reading somewhere that creating shows for direct-to-streaming is liberating because, although it is quite similar to TV in that it's telling a story in chunks (usually 30 to 60 minutes) without a guarantee of continuation (renewal), you don't have the primary constraints of traditional television: fitting into a specific time slot, saving time for commercials, and creating hooks that lead neatly into each ad break to get the audience to stick around.
glompers
Vimeo has tried to prioritize indie feature discovery from what I can tell. Not sure what its ownership or business is. Also not sure how it compares to (in music) soundcloud's or bandcamp's approaches.
browningstreet
Got some recommendations?
wongarsu
Rooster Teeth (of "Red vs Blue" and "RWBY" fame) did the "indie filmmaker on youtube" thing pretty successfully. Eventually they moved to their own site, then fell apart after a lot of drama and internal differences.
Also vaguely guestures at all of youtube. Most youtube creators are independent, and a lot of them have higher production value than indie movies. You just don't recognize them because of how the algorithm and monetization favor regular installments of ~10 minute episodes, causing most content to take that form. A documentary simply works better on youtube as a Tom Scott video than as a 45 minute piece (though there are plenty of those too)
bombcar
Apparently one of the original Rooster Teeth guys bought the rights back and is going to do something ...
nabeards
As someone who has built a streaming service, I’m always amazed how much money the studios throw at it and don’t have something good or profitable. The infra cost for my service was then 10% of revenue. I just wish the huge consolidation hadn’t happened, now all of the studios are too protective of their content.
If anyone has ideas for re-purposing or re-targeting a streaming service, I’m all ears.
illwrks
Movie rights will be a big factor also. Events like TIFF, Cannes etc, while being a platform to show films is also where deals are done, distribution rights are signed always for different territories etc. YouTube is essentially international which may invalidate some pre-existing licence and distribution agreements.
delecti
Youtube has the ability to limit videos to certain markets. One example is that the entirety of Mythbusters was uploaded in the past couple years, but isn't available to view in the US.
crashingintoyou
Have you never gotten an error about something being unavailable in your region on Youtube?
dehugger
Kung Fury would be my go-to example of "viral indie release".
duxup
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?
browningstreet
I have a list of movies you can't find anywhere, not even for pay, not even on on obscure services. I check every once in a while to see if they pop up (JustWatch.us is great for this, IMDB is copying). Example: "Amateur" by Hal Hartley, though it's easy enough to buy copies on DVD.
The problem is once the rights for a title end up in a library, the accessibility considerations operate at the library level, not the title level. So if some company owns the rights to "n" titles en masse, they're negotiating for the distribution rights to that library.
You can't really pull a Taylor Swift or Def Leppard "re-record for rights" move with movies.
UPDATE: Happy to be wrong about my cited example.. Thanks @andsoitis !
InitialLastName
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.
JKCalhoun
Abandonmedia. They've been posting abandoned software for decades now — without a peep as far as I know.
mason55
Yeah there are just a lot of titles with weird rights situations that no one cares about resolving. Maybe you lost clearance on a song in the movie, or one of the actors has a clause in their contract, or some company bought the distribution rights for a certain territory and then went out of business.
Lots of situations where resolving the rights issues is going to cost more than you expect the movie to bring in, especially once you start talking about splitting the revenue with online storefronts.
derektank
I would argue KanePixels (Kane Parsons) is doing the Indie filmmaker thing very successfully on YouTube. He went from creating a viral hit with his interpretation of The Backrooms, signed a deal with A24, and has continued releasing his own horror short films in the interim. The format isn't the standard 90-120 minutes of most studio movies but his longest videos are nearly an hour long and with each narrative spread across several videos, stitching the whole thing together would look something like a conventional film
eptcyka
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.
fsckboy
agree.
as a 2nd order effect, crowds out the competition: every 90 minutes spent watching a low value film of yours is time not spent watching anything of the competition.
giancarlostoro
Anything from before the 1980s should just be on YouTube, its easy cash for them on films that are sitting idle otherwise. Anything they aren't licensing to anyone anywhere should just be on YouTube. Or any sort of streaming platform that has sane ads, and anyone can see. It is really sad to me there's no genuine YouTube competitor.
jerf
For your searching convenience, they do seem to have all their full movies in a playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5Y4rNBCLaU&list=PL7Eup7JXSc...
That will pop up to The 11th Hour but the playlist has them all.
akovaski
A link to just the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7Eup7JXScZyvRftA2Q5h...
From IMDb:
The 11th Hour (2007, Documentary, 7.2)
The Wind and the Lion (1975, Adventure Epic, 6.8)
Mr. Nice Guy (1997, Martial Arts Dark Comedy, 6.2)
City Heat (1984, Buddy Cop, 5.5)
Michael Collins (1996, Docudrama, 7.1)
The Adventures Of Pluto Nash (2002, Space Sci-Fi Comedy, 3.9)
Chaos Theory (2007, Comedy Drama Romance, 6.6)
Mutiny on the Bounty (1962, Historical Globetrotting Adventure, 7.2)
Dungeons & Dragons (2000, Adventure Fantasy, 3.7)
Return Of The Living Dead Part II (1988, Zombie Horror Comedy, 5.7)
The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990, Dark Comedy, 5.6)
The Accidental Tourist (1988, Comedy Drama Romance, 6.7)
Critters 4 (1992, Horror Sci-Fi, 4.1)
Murder in the First (1995, Legal Thriller, 7.3)
The Year of Living Dangerously (1982, Drama Romance War, 7.1)
December Boys (2007, Drama Romance, 6.5)
Waiting for Guffman (1996, Satire, 7.4)
Lionheart (1987, Adventure Drama, 5.1)
Oh, God! (1977, Comedy Fantasy, 6.6)
Crossing Delancey (1988, Comedy Romance, 6.9)
Price of Glory (2000, Drama Sport, 6.1)
Flight of the Living Dead (2007, Horror, 5.1)
Deal of the Century (1983, Dark Comedy Satire Crime, 4.6)
Deathtrap (1982, Dark Comedy Suspense Mystery, 7.0)
The Mission (1986, Historical Epic Jungle Adventure, 7.4)
SubUrbia (1996, Comedy Drama, 6.7)
Hot To Trot (1988, Comedy Fantasy, 4.5)
True Stories (1986, Comedy Musical, 7.2)
The Science of Sleep (2006, Quirky Comedy Drama Romance, 7.2)
The Big Tease (1999, Comedy, 6.1)JKCalhoun
One film from 1962, one 1977, the rest 80's-plus.
Too bad we're not seeing 30's classics, etc.
realce
> Return Of The Living Dead Part II (1988, Zombie Horror Comedy, 5.7)
My favorite zombie flick, if you've not seen it you need to!
spunker540
Do I need to watch part 1 first?
iancmceachern
Check out Peroscope films.
They take public domain footage, mostly us government stuff, and release it and claim copyright over it.
I took some of their public domain footage and put it on YouTube and they freaked out.
Through logic and reason I was able to get them to admit they have no copyright right, as they were initially claiming.
But they did have the YouTube terms of service.
So, back to this.
If they had public domain stuff they wanted to protect, this is another less obvious way to do it.
ValentineC
My first thought upon reading the headline was that it's better that they put everything on YouTube, than delete more stuff like what they did to Cartoon Network's website:
https://slate.com/technology/2024/08/david-zaslav-warner-bro...
dehrmann
There just isn't much value in most old films. There are a handful of standouts per year, and anything in a major franchise, but the demand for everything else is low, so you might as well make it as easy to find as possible and get what money you can from it.
HighChaparral
It’s Zaslav-era WB so there’s probably some kind of weird tqx write-off happening, or some contractual agreement that they’re living up to in the cheapest way possible.
Some good stuff on there - shout out to The Mission, which includes one of Morricone’s greatest scores.
xhkkffbf
This is a good point. They may lose rights if they fail to distribute for a certain amount of time. They may revert to the filmmaker or someone else. This is a way to comply contractually.
rwmj
When Jeremy Irons was asked why he did Dungeons & Dragons (2000), he replied "Are you kidding? I'd just bought a castle, I had to pay for it somehow"
fullshark
Michael Caine's quote about Jaws 4 is similarly great:
"I have never seen the film, but by all accounts it was terrible. However I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific."
falcor84
As someone with more modest means, I'm wondering - was that just a quip, or is it really possible for rich people to buy property first, and then figure out how to pay for it? How do they finance it?
abofh
It depends on levels of money. At musk levels, it's cheaper to borrow from your shares on margin, spend that, and never repay anything but interest - no financing involved except lending out your own assets. At multi-million illiquid, you're going to go to a bank, show them accounts and historic income, and because you're an actor with bursty income, they'll smooth out the line and decide if the loan you want is above it or below it. He likely had the means for the down payment and the assets for enough monthlies that the bank felt it was de-risked, but you can also do hard-money loans and similar if you have expectations of payment - but they tend to come with heavy duty strings.
Which is to say - for musks, not like you or I, for the illiquid, very much the same process, but with money managers and the like doing the actual bank negotiation.
InitialLastName
> How do they finance it?
The same way most people do, with a mortgage. The difference is what a bank is willing to lend you if they see you have a significantly higher than average income.
It's also possible he wasn't just talking about the purchase payment. Large, old, valuable buildings also often require very large upkeep bills.
tantalor
Oh nice they got The Science of Sleep (2006) on here, great film with Gael García Bernal by Michel Gondry.
noneeeed
I'd forgotten all about that film, it was delightful.
Finnucane
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.
softwaredoug
These are movies nobody is lining up to syndicate, for a company desperate for cash. Why not dump them on YouTube and get a bit of ad revenue? It’s low effort relative to the income it generates. Even if it’s unlikely to make much money.
ninth_ant
The why not is because it potentially devalues the prestige of the individual work’s IP, and the brand in general.
This is short-term optimization, par for the course with the new Disovery-owned Warner Bros.
marinmania
I thought that at first, but if you look at the movies its hard to say any have much prestige? And you could probably make the case that getting more eyeballs on it will, if anything, make them a bit more valuable in 10 years. I still remember watching the same shitty movies on cable over and over as a kid just because they were available, and I imagine those movies have a higher place in the collective memory now because they were available.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7Eup7JXScZyvRftA2Q5h...
Though I would imagine if you were Tom Hanks or Ryan Reynolds you may be upset some of your least popular work is now the most accessible.
HelloMcFly
The selection added has mostly reached end-of-life on cultural relevance and/or prestige. This is like reopening a tapped mine hoping for a few more nuggets of value. If anything gets too much traction they'll move it to a paid service.
lotsofpulp
This stage was set 7 years ago when ATT overpaid for Time Warner by $60B+. There was no way to recover from that.
HDThoreaun
WB has decided these movies have no prestige.
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 just a matter of waiting out until the last person putting up a veto retired or moved on to other things.