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.
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.
* https://www.yahoo.com/tech/sony-succeeded-becoming-powerful-...
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.
I don't know what you're into but "The Guild" is pretty excellent example of the form.
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
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.
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)
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.
If anyone has ideas for re-purposing or re-targeting a streaming service, I’m all ears.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.