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.
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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.
They can at any time substitute the full movies with ads to buy the collection, before IP expires. It is a low cost experiment.
Making older movies publicly available at no cost (albeit with ads) is good, actually?
Is the suggestion that there's no bad content on Max and that's why they should put the movies there, instead, behind a paywall? Instead of Youtube, he wants these movies next to Dr. Pimple Popper?
(Ironically, I'm pretty sure this is #1 on Hacker News because people appreciate the heads-up about the free resource, and not because folks support his call to remove them from public view.)
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?
That will pop up to The 11th Hour but the playlist has them all.
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 !
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.
They have these relatively obscure movies that aren't really worth much so why not throw them on youtube and give them the best possible chance of being watched.
I think it's a great move honestly, I know a tv show from the UK that's been doing the same, hopefully more shows/movies will do it as well.
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.
* https://www.yahoo.com/tech/sony-succeeded-becoming-powerful-...
I doubt they're deleting the master copies or the master renders or anything, so the only thing that would be offloaded would be the "consumer" renders. A Blu-ray movie with no additional compression added is between 15-40 gigs.
A consumer like me has a 300 terabyte storage array, presumably Warner Bros has even more than that (and certainly could afford more than that), so it feels like 40 gigs per movie is basically nothing.
It's probably zero effort to upload them to YouTube. People watch them. YouTube generates ad revenue and pays out Warner Brothers.
They probably choose the movies nobody wants to pay for any more on VoD/DVD and nobody views on paid streaming services.
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)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.
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.
Some good stuff on there - shout out to The Mission, which includes one of Morricone’s greatest scores.
https://slate.com/technology/2024/08/david-zaslav-warner-bro...
It's been ages since I've seen "Oh God" or "Hot to Trot". Not great movies, not genre or culture defining, but fine. These are movies I'd watch if they were on.
I hope they do more. And I hope other distributors follow suit. Basically, I want Critters 1-3.
1. Clip a movie scene and crop it for vertical aspect ratio (maybe some AI is used here to choose the focus point of the scene)
2. Add royalty-free background music and possibly other tweaks like mirroring the video
3. Title it something generic that doesn’t acknowledge it’s a movie/show, like “College dropout beats Harvard Law grads to the job” for the scene from Suits (Note: for shorts, the title doesn’t matter if it’s algorithmically chosen to play next… in fact at this point the more relevant title is the optional link to a different short… the real title is barely visible)
4. Do not mention the name of the movie/show in the title or description
There are hundreds of accounts producing these shorts on an industrial scale. It’s easy to see how the automation works and also why it’s successful. It’s clickbait (people want to comment or ask for the title, or correct the title to mention it’s actually from a movie); it’s addicting (it funnels people into watching more clips from the same movie… funny how YouTube knows to do that but not that it’s copyrighted, btw); it’s self-optimizing (if the algorithm doesn’t surface the next short, people go looking for it specifically); and of course, it’s automatable (everything from curation to editing can be automated, and just a sprinkle of AI is apparently enough to obfuscate the automation).
What’s fascinating is that YouTube hasn’t stopped this. The shorts algorithm can obviously detect the similarity between clips from a movie, but the copyright/spam detection algorithm can’t detect the same.
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...
I don't know what you're into but "The Guild" is pretty excellent example of the form.
[1] https://www.sagaftra.org/sag-aftra-tv-and-theatrical-residua...
Why is this dumb? They get pennies for their assets today while they bolster the other tech giant that is going to kill them. Studios like WBD don't have the capital or the strategic vision to operate in this environment.
In practice, the great film's revenues have already "earned out" any advances so that $M/N must be shared with outsiders. Often, the duds haven't made enough so the studio gets to keep all $M/N.
I don't know that's what they're doing here. Certainly, they have enough data to accurately allocate revenues. But it's what's been done in the past.
I am rather curious as to why this is happening now (and happening across multiple countries, apparently) but I kinda like it.
I do get it, these movies are most likely basically "worthless" for WB at this point.
Hell, I remember seeing Deathtrap and True Stories in the Wal-Mart $5 DVD bin 20 years ago.
This is still better than letting them basically be completely lost/unavailable and the ad revenue makes it a positive cashflow proposition I bet.
I actually do have legit copies of Infinity Train, I bought all four seasons on Amazon before the huge purge a couple years ago, but I would like legit copies of Close Enough.
I genuinely don't know what Warner Bros actually wants us to do? Is their official stance "it's ok to pirate it"?
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.
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.
It IS available to stream! See https://www.halhartley.com/amateur
Unless they do this already and stuff I watch just does it badly, of course.
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.
I just speculate that if Blair Witch Project were made today, it would likely debut on a platform like YouTube before gaining wider recognition.
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
This also makes some of the movies more valuable by revealing hidden demand. WB will see their YT stats for their films and see where future investments or licensing deals may pay off. A streaming company is disincentivized to tell the movie owner how the film is doing.
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)
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.
Why not use some kind of interlacing and randomly sort the lines. The result is a valid video file which could be uploaded to YouTube. Then deinterlace with a browser plugin and the random pattern used to scramble the lines. Same can be applied to the audio.
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.
So this is basically just using YouTube as a FAST service.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_ad-supported_streaming_te...
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?
You might have to be a YouTube partner or something like that to make use of this stuff, though.
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
To boot, if there’s no revenue, there’s no need to pay creative people. Indeed, if it boosts expenses under Hollywood accounting practices, those expenses might offset other income that would otherwise be owed to artists and their estates.
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
That would be cool, but it won’t be very effective as a viral video if everyone needs to have a browser plugin installed :)
The challenge here is to circumvent the copyright algorithms while still looking like a normal video to the user (who has no external tools installed).
However, for things like hosting pirated streams or sharing content out-of-band, it would be interesting. It’s basically the a minimally lossless form of steganography.
Much of this not-fantastic-quality TV could probably be easily found on YouTube even without the rights holder being involved anyway - so better they get paid?
If they do, then they had no negotiating power in the first place, and so had nothing to lose by accepting those terms (because they were not going to get a better offer such as more cash upfront).
Anyway, not as big as BWP, but still a decent example of the concept under discussion, I think.
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.
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 or watch one of the shining diamonds in the rough.
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.
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Edit: copying my buried comments from below to expand on this.
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I have direct experience with this field.
I've written, directed, and acted in independent films. I've worked on everything from three person crews all the way up to 200 person shots. Even mocap and virtual production.
We're now developing film and VFX tools for individual artists, and the world is full of artists. It's been starved for films, however. The studio production system only had so much annual capacity per year, and most creators never get the opportunity to helm a project of their own.
You're not crying over the accessibility of digital art, digital music, indie games, or writing.
Film production and distribution has been bottlenecked at the studio level for far too long due to capital, logistics, and (previously) distribution barriers. That's all changing now.
Films are going to look more like fanfiction.net, Bandcamp, ArtStation, and Steam. That's a good thing.
I have friends in IATSE (film crew union) and AI is going to hurt their work. The nature of work changes, and new opportunities arise. But what's hurting them right now is that film productions are being offshored to Europe and Asia to break up their unions and bank on cheaper local labor. Production in Atlanta is one sixth of what it was just a few years ago.
I also have friends who write and direct that are looking at this as their big chance to build their own audience.
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.
I've personally been involved in doing this very thing, but just look at the apps for like Max where they have their linear channel offerings within the same UI as their VOD. While Max isn't ad supported, it's a similar concept.
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.
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.
If anyone has ideas for re-purposing or re-targeting a streaming service, I’m all ears.
Google has been buying railroad for access to right of way to lay fiber since the early 2000s. Peering agreements using their networks give them transit for free on other networks.
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/02/25/183201/google-is-li...
The argument is that few will watch the majority of WB's back catalogue, because their time is being spent with all the other attention sinks.
This places a monetary value on the content, not a social or cultural value.
I've written, directed, and acted in independent films. I've worked on everything from three person crews all the way up to 200 person shots. Even mocap and virtual production.
We're now developing film and VFX tools for individual artists, and the world is full of artists. It's been starved for films, however. The studio production system only had so much annual capacity per year, and most creators never get the opportunity to helm a project of their own.
You're not crying over the accessibility of digital art, digital music, indie games, or writing.
Film production and distribution has been bottlenecked at the studio level for far too long due to capital, logistics, and (previously) distribution barriers. That's all changing now.
Films are going to look more like fanfiction.net, Bandcamp, ArtStation, and Steam. That's a good thing.
I have friends in IATSE (film crew union) and AI is going to hurt their work. The nature of work changes, and new opportunities arise. But what's hurting them right now is that film productions are being offshored to Europe and Asia to break up their unions and bank on cheaper local labor. Production in Atlanta is one sixth of what it was just a few years ago.
I also have friends who write and direct that are looking at this as their big chance to build their own audience.
And truly live (which means probably under 10 seconds from lens to viewer - i.e. the time it takes for the "X win" notification to pop up on your phone) is even harder than traditional "live" in the 40-60 second window.
Ideally you want all viewer to view it at the same time (so when next-door are cheering on a feed 3 seconds ahead of you it's not spoilt).
Edit: You're right. Just disregard any laws and contracts in place. HN knows best. It must be that easy.
Then the stock market started inflating the value of streamers because of ARR projections and studios adopted a gold rush mentality, pulled back all their content and each tried to launch their own service. Of course, this quickly fragmented the streaming market as few consumers would subscribe to more than one or two services at a time. As stock valuations dropped back to reality, the server plus bandwidth costs started piling up and the also-ran streaming services became break-even boat anchors for most studios.
Now we're left with the cultural 'worst of all worlds'. A dozen inaccessible walled gardens each neglected by their owners and no easy, central way to find and watch an old, low-value film.
You may have an actor of a certain budget who has no roles lined up currently, but is a pretty safe bet he will get some lined up eventually, and so he's a decent risk for a loan.
This is private lending and is a completely different world than a home loan that is resold. Depending on the dollar amount, the lender will have their own appraisers, etc taking careful look at the collateral (which might be the castle you're buying, or that and more, or something else entirely, like royalties due, etc).
They will then structure it so that it's a heads they win, tails they don't lose - only lending as much as they're sure they'll be able to get back out (up to and including having alternate buyers lined up to purchase the property if it gets foreclosed, etc).
Per movie may seem expensive, but at the low end of hours per month watch time streaming services are a bad deal.
Agreed, but because all of that should be public domain at this point. The idea that some company needs rent-seeking motivation to allow people to view 50-year old media literally until everyone who could have consumed it when it was published is dead is absurd.
The back catalogue will have a few scattered gems that you can find amongst the sea of mass media that appealed to its audience at the time. Most of that content no longer relates or makes sense to us. There's also a massive load of dreck and garbage.
People should be realistic about this instead of emotionally invested against AI as the news media has tried to sway this. It's just a tool, and artists are starting to use it productively.
Under that, everything before 1985 would be free of copyright already.
I think the majority of Americans would greatly prefer that model; but, The Mouse had other plans and has extended copyright to approx 100 years.
Here's a really small scoped short film made with the limited tools available half a year ago. It accomplished simple storytelling with limited tooling:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=t_SgA6ymPuc
You're going to see more and more ambitious stuff soon. We're beginning to have the ability to control characters, have consistency, block, and steer.
By that, I mean something where either the dialog or the video (or both) is completely done by AI. By successful, let's say something that wins a non-AI award (For example, an Oscar or Emmy) or receives something like a 70% positive review on rotten tomatoes, IMDB, or some other metacritic platform that is not specifically made for reviewing AI art.
I do not believe the AI will live up to the hype of "We'll be making more long-form, quality content per month than entire Hollywood production years."
I think we'll see long form AI, I don't think it will be high quality or even something that most people want to watch. The only people that will want to watch that sort of AI slop are AI enthusiasts who want AI to be amazing.
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, like making these things work on different TV brands, versions, older models, etc.
Pushing all the complexity to YT seems like a total no-brainer.
The true genius is that where it would be really easy to be mocking these small town people and their hokey play, the movie toes the line flawlessly of making sure the viewer isn’t really laughing AT them all that much. It’s also worth noting that the play itself at the end isn’t a disaster but actually a wonderfully produced show that the audience and town love.
I think Guest’s more recent films went a bit too far into the “mocking” part of the Mocumentary, but Guffman doesn’t.
Also worth mentioning Catherine O’Hara drunk in the Chinese restaurant might be one of the most realistic portrayals of being drunk I’ve seen in a movie.
Live streaming with HLS is equal to distributing static files and can be very low latency.
If you need to go below 3s of latency, yes it becomes harder, but everything else is thankfully solved.
The bigger issue with live streaming are the peaks: 0 views in one second and millions in the next. Even with static content delivery that leads to all kinds of issues.
Flooding the market with AI-generated content -- even if that content is good -- is not going to stop me from watching (or re-watching) older human-created productions.
I don't think I'm all that unique. I don't watch broadcast/cable television anymore, but I know people (especially those less technologically sophisticated, of any ages) who still flip through the on-screen TV guide, and are happy to tune in to watch a 1980s movie on some random channel, ads and all.
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.
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.
AI can copy things that are already copied, but you’ll never get something as paradigm shifting as Toy Story 1.
Yeah it's really annoying that they all recreated the wheel instead of just playing ball with netflix or paying netflix to license their technology. The only feature I miss from another service is that x-ray view stuff that Amazon has to let you know who is in a scene.
I don't think LLMs can write nuanced character arcs, so let's not include them.
On the subject of the visuals being completely AI, we need to be able to steer the video with more than just text prompts. Do you remove the possibility of using motion capture performances, compositing, or other techniques?
I think we'll see 100% non-photon, non-CG visuals. I just think those performances will be human and the films will have a very human touch.
If you can make that adjustment, then I think we have a bet.
AI is just a tool. And artists are going to use the tools that can get the job done.
It’s hard to believe how far Hollywood has fallen. I haven’t paid much attention to trailers in years.
I think it's more likely that once Gen Z is the oldest surviving generation, maybe no one will watch any content longer than a TikTok due to attention span degradation and Hollywood just churns out vertical 2 minute videos direct to phones rather than release movies, and those would be some mixture of AI and human-created work.
Tell me that any of the "Jurassic Park" films beyond the first were necessary. Or the "Lord of the Rings" films and shows beyond the original trilogy. These are products of the classical studio system. They keep trying to remake "Back to the Future" and as soon as Zemeckis dies, they'll have their way.
There will be amazing art made using AI, and AI will enable extremely talented creators that could have never made it in the classical studio system.
Don't be so pessimistic.
We're going to have "Obra Dinn" and "Undertale" equivalents in film soon. Small scale auteurs sharing their mind's eye with you.
Things like Netflix realized it too and buried the "Continue Watching" at a randomized index in an endless carousel, added Autoplay and even starts autoplaying something different after you finish a series. And of course, newer things like TikTok have always been this way. All these things are, I'd argue, user-hostile in that they're optimizing toward, in the extreme case, complete addiction.
https://www.youtube.com/feed/storefront
Includes Roger Rabbit, Billy Madison, Good Will Hunting, Wayne's World, Mars Attacks, Grumpy Old Men, Osmosis Jones, the 90s TMNT movie…
(It was a Roger Rabbit-style live action + cartoon character blend, based on an awesome newspaper parody, that was completely created, received rave reviews, and then shitcanned by the befuddling new accounting practices of Warner Bros. Discovery.)
After quitting most of social media, the jump-cutting in a lot of shows and movies nowadays gives me headaches weirdly... maybe that's just me though.
Also, everyone that's at least a teenager has grown up on human produced content - most of this worry will only manifest if there's a generation that strictly prefers AI produced content instead of it just being a complement (e.g. the generated pictures in articles, or automatic clips from Twitch streams)
I would also bet that sometime in the next 10 years, we'll have a masterpiece of cinema on our hands where the heavy lifting (visuals, sound, even screenwriting) was largely done by an AI, helpfully nudged and curated at important moments by human experts. Or, by just one person.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilcoe_Castle https://jeremyirons.net/kilcoe-castle/
It’s quite something. He bought it for IEP 150,000 (around €190,000) but likely spent an order of magnitude more restoring it.
Yes I exclude that, because the primary reason to say "We'll be making more long-form, quality content per month than entire Hollywood production years." is that AI has eliminated or vastly eliminated the need for human actors. I'd accept a model trained on motion data or whatever, but I do not think something that augmenting that visual input data counts towards actually reducing production costs and speeding up the process of creating media.
I'd accept modifications to the bet that would still allow for rapid media production. If the human staffing is virtually identical to what it is today then that's not AI actually reducing costs. Hence, AI needing to do the majority of the labor.
For example of what I'd accept, a 2 person team that creates a 20+ minute ensemble film in less than a month or 2 that meets the success criteria above. I'd reject it if the film is "Watch ted go insane in this room" (I think for obvious reasons).
> I think we'll see 100% non-photon, non-CG visuals. I just think those performances will be human and the films will have a very human touch.
We already have that AFAIK. But again, I don't think that's a huge cost or time savings.
> AI is just a tool. And artists are going to use the tools that can get the job done.
I agree, it is a tool. I disagree with claims of how much content it will ultimately enable to be produced.
Night of the Living Dead has been freely available for some time for example and is still considered a classic of horror. I'm not sure it hurt Criterion when they released a version of it. People are paying for the restoration and extras.
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. I won't accept some spam film that an AI magazine touts as being a masterpiece.
Cutesy error pages are cute exactly once, then they're even worse than a minimally viable error page.
It’s like the most bizarre version of a walled garden.
At least using YouTube kind of makes it accessible to more people. And YouTube does have some high bitrate options
As an aside, props to the team. It's been a while but I remember being pleasantly surprised after getting shuffled over from HBO GO. It's even more impressive to know it was such a small team compared to other services.
"Streaming", who gives a hoot, just download it like everything else. "Service" can take a hike, video player software already exists and all the UI work is done. That part is utterly superfluous.
So humans steering diffusion is off limits? No Krea, no Invoke, no articulated humans?
It's like you're taking away Premiere or Final Cut here. Text prompts are not the currency of AI film. Controllability levers are essential to this whole endeavor.
> I do not think something that augmenting that input data counts towards actually reducing production costs and speeding up the process of creating media.
You haven't spent much time on set, then. An animator can do a performance capture on their webcam and adjust the IK. That's way different than booking a sound stage, renting an Arri Alexa and lenses, and bringing out a whole cast and crew. Set dec, wardrobe, makeup, lighting versus the moral equivalent of a Kinect and a garage studio.
My 6 AM call times, early mornings climbing up to the top shelf of the prop house to grab random tubas and statues, and signing countless legal forms and insurance paperwork all beg to differ with your claims here.
> AI has eliminated or vastly eliminated the need for human actors.
I don't think it necessitates this at all. Kids are going to be flocking to the media to turn themselves into anime VTubers and Han Solos and furries and whatever they can dream up.
Artists want to art. They're going to flock to this. We're going to have to open up the tech for that reason alone.
I'm sure fast moving marketers and the cottage industry of corporate workplace training videos won't use humans, but the creative side will. ElevenLabs is great, but there's also a reason why they hired Chris Pratt, Anya-Taylor Joy, and Jack Black in the Mario movie.
> For example of what I'd accept, a 2 person team that creates a 20+ minute ensemble film in less than a month or 2 that meets the success criteria above.
I'll posit this: a two person team will make a better Star Wars, a better Lord of the Rings, a better Game of Thrones. An ensemble cast of actors piloting AI diffusion characters (or whatever future techniques emerge) will make a film as well acted as Glengarry Glen Ross. Perhaps even set in some fantasy or sci-fi landscape. I bet that we'll have a thousand Zach Hadels, Vivienne Medranos, and Joel Havers finding massive audiences with their small footprint studios, making anime, cartoons, lifelike fantasy, lifelike science fiction, period dramas, and more. And that AI tools will be the linchpin of this creative explosion.
It is already starting too. Click on some random 'read a sci-fi story' and your YT feed will be full of AI pictures with moderate coherency (depending on what AI tools they are using). Sometimes it will be very short videos with moderate in scene and poor inter scene coherency. It was utterly garbage a year ago with most of them sticking to static pictures. Voice clone is like 98% there and hard to tell at this point. If you listen to the story structure you can tell an AI probably wrote the story too.
There are services out there were you can say 'write me the lyrics to a metal song about ducks and chickens' and then take that paste it into another service and say 'make a metal song with these lyrics' then paste the results into another service and put an AI voice of darth vader over it using the lyrics. That this is coming to video is not that big of a leap. That has gone from random limbs popping out of peoples foreheads to weird little janky things.
I can today just use chatgpt and say 'write me a SCP memo on a man eating couch that stalks elephants of keter class' It will. I can add some small details and it will be an acceptable waste of my time. Written form is today being consumed quickly by the likes of chatgpt. The other types are next in line.
People are already doing this. It is all over YT and tiktok.
Does Netflix license their technology to anyone? I know of examples like BAMTech, although I don't even know if they still take on outside clients or just do Disney now. I get that their might be good options to license and that fewer companies should build crappy in-house products, but is Netflix one of them?
From Netflix's perspective, it's not clear to me that the payment for licensing technology to e.g. NBC is worth it, versus hoping that they end up with an inferior product, especially when they're competing with each other for customers and licensed content.
My pro-AI director friends tell me this is ultimately what they've been doing with humans all along. Sometimes he humans don't give them what they're looking for, so they ask again. And they have to fit within logistical and budgetary constraints.
1) Everything. A single prompt will generate a full-length, high quality movie.
2) One person will be able to spend a few weeks or months to produce a high quality movie using purely AI generated visuals and audio, with at least part of the script written by AI.
3) AI will never replace some aspects of high quality movies, although it's not quite clear yet which aspects. It could be writing, acting, directing, or something else.
4) AI will never replace most aspects of high quality movies.
5) Society will rebel against any form of AI in movies; it doesn't matter how good AI gets, nobody will watch movies touched in any way by AI.
My guess is 2.
If that happens in the next 10 years and we judge "as good as starwars" using my above criteria. You would win the bet.
We on?
You need at least 1000 subscribers and a certain amount of video watch time per year to qualify, but even fairly small channels can meet this bar. When people talk about getting monetized on YouTube, this is what they mean.
> we judge "as good as starwars" using my above criteria.
Just to clarify, this would be an AI film or "tv show" winning at traditional awards: Emmys (The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences), SAG Awards, Oscars (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences), etc. Or traditional film festivals such as Sundance and Cannes, eg. winning the Palme d'Or. I would even be happy setting a threshold whereby a film or long-format show must win more than one award from several such institutions.
Maybe a preponderance of praise (20 or more) from major film and media critics like Roger Ebert (RIP), Leonard Maltin, Richard Brody, et al. could also be a criteria that must be met. Though perhaps that's a necessary condition anyway.
This all sounds good to me.
What they really should do is license their content to netflix for a fair price and just let netflix be the service people use.
I agree -- if I could separate these out into 3 categories rather than 2, Netflix/YT would be in a class of their own, way ahead of the pack.
I am constantly surprised how Apple TV offers such a poor experience despite their excellence in Product Management in other product areas. I was watching Apple TV last night and my wife and I slogged thru the recap and intro because we were so afraid of the app chocking on the "Skip" button.
Aside from Apple, which seems to be a Product Management issue, I find other platforms to bucket into two areas:
1. Poor performance, probably due to bad threading and poor cacheing
2. Incompatibility with older TVs. TVs last 8-10yrs easily these days, and features have topped off so people do not upgrade. This means you have a LOT of target builds and compatibility to check and I dont think they test all the possible builds.
Not enough to hurt a paid service. Let's say 6Mbps for pretty solid 1080p. And at peak maybe we have .5 streams per account going simultaneously (I bet the real number is significantly lower). So we need 3Mbps per account. How much does a Mbps cost? "Across key cities in the U.S. and Europe, 400 GigE prices range from $0.07 to $0.08 per Mbps."
Peacock doesn't even offer 4K most of the time or on the olympics, but for services that do a $1 upcharge should be more than enough to cover the bandwidth difference.
The technology has to exist first. The technology is first picked up by early adopters: hustlers, marketers, hypsters. Not by practicing professionals.
It takes time for the new tools to work their way into the creative field. It first gets pushback, then it happens a little, and then all at once.
We're still super early days into this tech. Give it more time and it'll be all-capable and everywhere.
The canary in the coal mine is all the young people playing with it.
This does not appear to be true based on any articles I can find. I do believe they heavily follow the trends from their analytics in what the shows they buy and what they cancel, though.
There is no point buying everything as a streaming provider. It doesn't get you more customers and it costs money.
Heck, Apple will not even let you put up anything on the iTunes store to purchase - they have to be very confident it will recoup their costs for encoding, ingest time etc etc.
Making up "famous" examples doesn't make your case stronger, but the opposite.
To that end, I only buy physical media that can be copied and have its DRM removed. On the plus side, Blu-Ray turns 20 next year and still provides better image quality than your typical 1080p stream.
Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver - she usually doesn't get the romantic role.
She became so enamoured with Mel Gibson that the man whom she eventually married resembles Gibson.
Linda Hunt won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress (her character is male in the movie), she played the "boss" on NCIS-LA TV show for several years.
wikipedia page says 88% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Apple and Amazon Prime and Youtube seem to enable other services via their platforms, presumably for a cut. If the cut is large enough, seems like a good business move for Netflix also -- let the content owners focus on their business rather than some random broadcasting company trying to hire AWS infrastructure engineers and 3rd party platform testing experts.
We're talking about movies that are 45 years old at a minimum. The majority of the people "involved in making the film" are dead at this point.
Several studios have done this for years. Paramount literally did it more than a decade ago.
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/...
The way Amazon prime does it is much like a traditional cable provider -- you can opt into channels (e.g., Hallmark channel) for additional fees per month. Everything purchased appears on Amazon as a universal bucket of content, same UI same everything. Amazon appears to handle the tech and billing. As a consumer, it is beautiful -- you can subscribe and unsubscribe from services monthly, rather than waiting for some once-every-3-yrs renewal contract. You can do everything online rather than waiting an hour for customer service. And thank heavens you dont need to install some random half-baked streaming "App" via the Samsung TV App store.
I'm assuming Amazon takes a cut of the monthly fee. If the MRR of the monthly cut Amazon gets is higher than the cost to deliver, it is a first order win. I assume the marginal engineering work is trivial. I also assume the only marginal costs are the extra metered cost of bandwidth, storage, etc.
I do think there is an issue though -- if the cost of the bundler (Amazon in this case) gets too high, I can see consumers scared off by this ever-increasing bill (Imagine you had a $50/mo netflix bill for example.) Of course, for Amazon this isnt a problem since practically every human I know has a load of random Amazon Marketplace charges on their credit card already they cannot reconcile anyway.
So there are so many (hundreds? thousands?) of DVDs/copies floating out there, to the point that nobody would pay a fee to watch them.
I had a collection of those 'free' DVDs that came in newspapers/magazines. Some years back I 'ripped' them all (kept photos of the album with the DVDs as proof of ownership) and threw away (responsibly) hundreds of DVD disks. I have never watched any of them.
I do not believe that all these "views" listed are real.. "True stories", 29k views in 6 days?? Really?? I think people search for "<title> full movie" and click on anything that comes up, as they search for some blockbuster/pirated movie.
And/or some people will click, use their InternetDownloadManager (or similar), download the 1080, save it, and never watch it.
If you want to make money from a movie, that seems a much better option.
I am pretty sure what was syndicated and shown on TV here was the original 60s cut though, since we have far fewer ads than the US.
Which, to be fair ... considering the past, we always have one or two notable indie films inspired by access to tech, so we'll probably see one or two more in years to come, amid a sea of slop.
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 network, they can do 100g HTTPS per port!
Amazon Prime 4K HDR on the other hand looks like garbage on every platform I've used -- the compression is unbearable in any dark scene.
True, but that is why this is a hard engineering challenge -- there are a lot of variations on client-side devices which need to be supported well. Upgrade cycles for TVs is 3x that of phones, is my guess.
They have two major streaming services (which they originally planned to merge), Discovery+ and MAX (formerly HBO Max).
Yes, they did. But when I pointed out that they didn't in fact own the copyright they highlighted this detail about the youtube terms if service, so I still had to take the video down, not because it violated copyright, but because it violated the YouTube terms of service.
Focusing on resolution is like asking "how strong is one meter of rope" without talking about the composition of the rope.
With streaming video, image quality ultimately comes down to the codec and the bitrate. They probably use a relatively low bitrate regardless of codec.
It doesn’t need to win awards or prestige.
Someone needs to say “play me new episodes of the office or arrested development” and it needs to generate something that resembles the office or arrested development. People can have the noise on in the background, and it won’t matter if it isn’t quite coherent or super funny.
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" button shows up, the focus isnt the button, so you press it and the show stops and goes back to the main screen.
The buttons dont properly highlight when scrolling, the difference is so subtle it is hard to know what you are selecting (or not)
With the remote, it is easy to over or underscroll because of the sensitivity of the touchpad.
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!)
But acceptable quality can definitely go smaller. Especially if "acceptable" is judged by the significant compression artifacts I see on actual cable TV all the time.
1. It puts these otherwise worthless movies to work and earns some ad revenue even if it is peanuts
2. There is always the chance a clip goes inexplicably viral on social and suddenly finds new relevance to the point that someone does want to pay money for it.
Video player controls have been a solved problem for something like several decades. It's actually impressive that they managed to screw it up so badly.
The only company that actually makes good money from being a content middleman is, somehow, YouTube. I don't know how they do it. YouTube is among the greatest businesses in human history.
Released in that dead zone known as late august, in 1988.
0, zero, null!!!, percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. 22/100 on Metacritic.
Nominated for 5 Razzies - of course, they didn't "win" any.
Don't think I've ever seen it on TV.
"In an interview in 2011, Bobcat Goldthwait said that he got the script for Hot to Trot and wrote "Why would I do this?" on the cover, to which his manager responded by writing a dollar sign"
And peering with Comcast is almost the same price and transit.
deutsche telekom, Telstra and the Korean Telcos also do this.
"City Heat has the misfortune to peak in its first five minutes. "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.
It's quite doable for 'normal' engineers to make a steaming platform. You need to get the video files out there on some CDN, you need some service for the DRM keys (which needs to scale, and handle the different access packages), and you probably want some history and profile stuff. Easy enough. But for the best experience you want every video to start playing in less than a second. That means getting those starting video segments as close as possible to the customer, it means optimizing that DRM key delivery, and optimizing the player so it just gets that video pushed to the screen ASAP.
https://stock.periscopefilm.com/contact-stock/
As I said, super unpleasant folks.
A flood of high quality AI content might devalue it as it becomes too normal, familiar or expected. In a strange way, this might reinvigorate interest in back catalogs.
Also, some content is truly timeless regardless of its production quality. Our kids have the world’s content at their disposal and their favorite is currently Tom & Jerry episodes from the 1960s. Go figure.
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.
And on my TV Netflix manages sub-second (at least sometimes). IDK how. Maybe they somehow give me the DRM keys ahead of time? Maybe everything in the "continue watching" is pre-approved? Maybe the first couple of seconds are handled differently, maybe they are not DRM protected? Maybe the netflix intro logo thingy is cached locally, and then stuff happends in the background? It is after all more pleasant to hear the intro sound that watch a spinning loading-thingy. Maybe as I move the selection across stuff they pre-emptively fetch the first seconds? In some cases it also seems to start auto-playing in the background, so the only thing that happends when I press a selection is that the GUI overlay dissapears.
In addition to that, whenever users are just starting out, their videos still get ad rolls but the creator doesn't get any money. That's millions of new videos every day that Youtube can monetize until those creators are eligible to collect the checks for themself (if ever).
Also, YouTube does aggressive caching of very old videos that have very few views. You might need to wait 10 seconds for YT to fetch the video from cold storage before watching, but in the grand scheme of things, it's worth it to them.
For most viewers, the discretion is worthwhile for better storytelling.
They think it's going to makes more money with YouTube advertisement than the traditional copy selling.
DVD and HDD PVRs for analog broadcasts did capture at 480i but were wildly expensive.
Subchannels are an interesting concept, but suffer from compression loss from packing in multiple streams into a single 6 MHz slice that would otherwise be a single channel.
Don’t get me started on the fact that we are limited at 1080i as well.
Couldn't work out if this channel is the creator but there a bunch of them - https://m.youtube.com/@demonflyingfox/videos
If the singing is ML-generated then I think that's pretty impressive too.
Looks like the channels started out as still images with Ken Burns Effect only 2 years ago. That's some progress.
Take a look at their playlists to see what I mean, tons of stuff: https://www.youtube.com/@Channel4/playlists
They've also got other channels, eg you can watych most of grand designs over here: https://www.youtube.com/@Channel4Homes/playlists
Guessing they realised its more profitable to use someone elses bandwidth and run ads.
There are open source HTML players tho but they are not as powerful and feature rich as YouTube player.
I remember watching IGN gaming videos on their website's player and the experience was horrible. Tbh idk what's the best open source video player out there right now.
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 massive disappointment to anyone who was interested in doing exactly what is being described.
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 had to deal with Viaplay HR recently to get some documents out, took a month to get ahold of someone who could do it...
It has the best performance I've ever seen by Kevin Bacon, and a solid performance from Christian Slater. Gary Oldman is a solid villian. R. L. Emery does his usual thing, but he's really good at that usual thing. I think about lines and ideas from it frequently. Granted, this is partly because the movie came out when I was 15 and I watched it a formative age with friends. But I've also watched it recently, and I think it holds up.
For people who only watch a couple movies per month, this is cheaper, with more variety, than any streaming service. While also avoiding the trap of forgotten subscriptions that aren’t being used.
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.
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.
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.
You can watch Tarkovsky's movies, for example.
And one of my personal favorites - Kin-Dza-Dza! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYHv8eJrW2Y
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.
As a bit of a contrived example, you want to distribute Superman 4 in China for a year. You have to secure rights to the film, but you cannot secure rights to the score from the US version as the license is not compatible. You have to get a license-compatible score and make sure the movie complies with the Chinese censorship. And the licensing periods have to overlap.
Multiply that by however many regions you want to distribute the movie in and add accounting complexity for each region.
https://shop.warnerbros.co.uk/products/warner-bros-100th-ann...
Google had the infrastructure, expertise, experience, and an army of top tier coders to execute on any engineering challenger, all of that even before it acquired YouTube.
Google is mainly an ads business. An expertise edge not only in engineering at large scale, but also in the delivery of web ads. And, given their ads business perform on profiling people, YouTube consumption habits feed the rest of the beast.
If these didn't skip your kind, yet still wondering how did they do it, the following were crucial to make Google unique in their ability to succeed with YouTube (and the rest)
- An engineering first company. They hire wagons of product people and managers, but when things don't turn out positive they switch back to their roots. As an anecdote, on day the CEO felt things were going south. Fired all (probably just most) managers and tasked engineers to figure things out.
- A coherent vision. Google doesn't jump on where's the hype. Their position in A.I recently perhaps couldn't resist the pressure. It sticks to the core competencies while building experimental products on green fields that fit in growing the core business.
- Long term. Clearly Google has so far resisted to make a quick buck. The no evil slogan is gone, but the spirit remain in building long term value. That kept them from tarnishing their reputation while reaping the amounts of profits once everyone could only swear by their products (mail, drive, YouTube, of course search, Android thriving as now the only remaining competitor to iOS, if any other company had acquired Android in that shape when Google swooped it, it would have given up on it seeing how long the road was about to take to make it a viable mobile consumer product)
How did they do it? Google is in the top 5 of all companies that have ever existed. Takes more than a genius and plenty of humbleness to achieve this feat.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
A streaming service needs to have all offered content available on disk. I can absolutely see WB offloading the storage cost to Google.
Finally, if you want to jump a few seconds instantly, like if you just missed a few lines of dialogue, the thing to do is to physically press down the left or right directional pad (the edges of the circle) while praying to the touchpad gods that you don't accidentally quiver by 0.2mm and be detected as a swipe which will do the wrong thing.
Of course, it's proof of Apple's poor usability that literally anyone reading this who owns the device doesn't already know how to do all three of those functions. But we're still at the peak of the fad of 'minimalism' instead of putting dedicated buttons for each of these in an ergonomic arrangement and printing labels on them.
Debrid and torrent indexing services are simple websites/APIs with some mostly proprietary hacked together backends. Some of them have subscriptions, but you know what you buy if you subscribe, and many don't even have recurring payments. Someone probably makes some profit out of those, but I'd guess the margins are quite slim, and there's a lot of competition.
There are surely a lot of scams out there too, but I'm quite well aware what my $3 per month buys and I know better what I'm installing or downloading than with any commercial services.
Majority of what's happening underneath is done by the saints of the scene, taking huge risks for zero pay.
Netflix: 15-18 Mbps Disney+: 25-30 Mbps Amazon Prime Video: 15-18 Mbps Apple TV+: 25-40 Mbps HBO Max: 15-20 Mbps
This is from an LLM but it tallies with what I remember reading. Apple TV is by far the best, followed by Disney+.
Netflix unfortunately seem to use any improvement in compression encoding efficiency to reduce bitrates, rather than improve PQ at the same bitrate. It's definitely got worse over time. I also remember reading that for content they deem more compressible they use a lower bitrate.
I can sort of get that on the lower plans, but its frustrating they won't improve PQ (or at least keep it the same) for the (expensive) 4K plan.
Do you have the old black remote that looks like a small elongated trackpad? The newer gray remote with the 4k Apple TV is excellent.
In the era of "the cinema has fewer screens than an AI character has fingers", "big media" -- movies and TV -- were cultural touchstones. Everyone knows Luke Skywalker, the Brady Bunch, or the Jaws theme as baseline references, even if they've never seen the corresponding media.
Now, even before the AI boom, we've got so many choices that we're all in independent fandoms with less and less "common currency". If I made a joke at work about dressing up as a human-sized NEC PC-9801[0], what are the odds any of my co-workers will get it?
AI would accelerate that process. You'll have a thousand niche movies a week all sliding through the local cineplex. There might be fifteen people who ever pay to see "Dragon Locomotive Mechanic Samurai Warrior XVI: Return Of Admiral Becky", and will anyone want to talk with you about it after you leave the cinema?
[0] plug for 16-Bit Sensation
Blair Witch was achievable not just because it was low-tech but because the premise can be done cheaply.
If I want to make (for example), a globe-trotting spy film, locations and travel are expensive. If there's going to be car crashes, props are expensive. If I do it on a hobbyist budget, it will look the part.
To be honest, I expected to rise of the "all CGI" film more than the AI-gen film. You still have full artistic control rather than wrestling the gacha on specifics, but now you can afford to level Paris and rebuild it in the next scene, and you don't have to worry about the lead actor gaining 10kg before the sequel.