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

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?

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 !

Not sure how obscure you are willing to go, but a quick look on private trackers do list the movie.

> browningstreet 43 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–]

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

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.

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.

Tou-freakin'-che

Abandonmedia. They've been posting abandoned software for decades now — without a peep as far as I know.