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

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.

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.

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.

This stage was set 7 years ago when ATT overpaid for Time Warner by $60B+. There was no way to recover from that.

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.

WB has decided these movies have no prestige.

I think prestige is hard to gauge from availability channels, and ebbs and flows. Sometimes visibility even increases interest and regard, if it's a sort of forgotten film.

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.

Well, if any of these movies ever end up in a box like this I'm going to feel ripped off. That's the prestige those movies have now lost.

https://shop.warnerbros.co.uk/products/warner-bros-100th-ann...