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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

South Park has been available on their website free to stream with ads.

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.

content is by far the biggest cost for running your own streaming service

Does YT offer more revenue than something like Tubi?

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...

[2]: https://www.relay.fm/downstream

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.

Is Comcast still charging content providers and CDNs for peering?

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.

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

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.

> 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

"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

That's how it started, as far as I know, but these services now offer lots of content on-demand as well.

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.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6175006

> Youtube also shows ads

Not on my devices :)

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 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.

Yeah, just like how the Odyssey became worthless when people started writing things down, the bible fell into obsolescence with the printing press, and Ulysses was usurped by the internet.

if it is on-demand, then it is AVOD. A company that started as FAST might have pivoted or decided to release the content they used to program their FAST channel as AVOD as well.

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.

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.

>With AI, this entire vast content library is about to be worthless anyway

That’s just not how humanities work

Yeah I can't wait for "Forest Gump 2", The Simpsons Live Action starring John C. Reilly as Barney, and "Lord of the Rings But It's A Wes Anderson Movie". AI distilling the absolutely worst and most cynical Hollywood trends into full length motion pictures. I've yet to see anything remotely approaching non-slop from AI-generated video.

Thanks, I hate it. Can you point me to any examples of AI-generated content that's actually worth reading/watching/listening to?

> 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.

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.

YouTube doesn't even bother with scene cut detection; they'll insert ads mid-sentence. A lot.

Google owns a large percentage of the backbone and does not pay for traffic. It owns not just its own fiber, but also leases dark fiber and right of way.

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...

Silicon Valley Brain Rot claims another victim. Sad to see.

Art doesnt cease to be art when new forms of art are materializing. Its up to the viewer.

That wasn't the argument.

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.

It seems most of the things Netflix produces is optimized by the algo for attention. When I feel it directing me gives me the ick. Looking at you Squid Game.

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 do.

It takes a lot of YouTube views to add up to a Apple/Amazon/etc rental.

> they continue to get it wrong for live event streaming

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).

But it also takes very little effort or cost... It's effectively free money at their scale.. no bandwidth fees, no storage, no user membership, etc... it's hard to sell a pile of junk no one wants to watch in a subscription too -- okay that might be harsh, but a LOT of old stuff is do do hard to watch nowadays... So there's certainly some great classics.. but also a lot of stuff that most people would never watch outside a class assignment

I absolutely agree.

It’s also a silly to believe that because it’s old it’s culturally significant. There’s plenty of ancient dross in the back catalogues.

100%.

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.

That’s one way to keep you watching, you’ve at least gotta hear the rest of the sentence! /s

This was already true irrespective of any emerging media.

It's super early, and a lot of artists have issues with controllability that make the tools hard to incorporate. This is quickly changing.

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.

Tell you what, let's make a bet. I'll bet you $100 that there will not be a successful long form (more than 20 minutes) AI production in the next 10 years.

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.

>> 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.

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 resolution was often terrible, somewhere around 240i and 360i.

It's gotten better, though! The digitization of broadcast TV added a bunch of new channels, which are in HD. They have decimal channel numbers.

It’s actually not harder thanks to HLS: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming

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.

I don't agree with that argument. I am constantly finding new movies and TV shows to watch that I genuinely enjoy, but I still (reasonably often, even) watch or re-watch older content that I end up enjoying just as much.

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.

Cloudflare wishes it peered with everyone and steers its own astroturfing pressure groups hoping to achieve that. The economics are similar though; their major product remains DDoS sinking, so driving down the marginal cost of traffic is Cloudflare’s strategy. The difference is that the content they mediate is thereby an incentive towards peering and not the core business proposition.

"Culturally significant" is the wrong metric, and shows that you don't really understand why people watch what they watch.

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.

> Judging from the clunky, buggy, nonsensical experiences on 2nd tier streaming services (i.e., everything except Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Disney+, Max)

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.

Biggest cost is generating an ad platform that can get enough data to serve relevant ads to people increasing the effectiveness of the ads. You can't beat googles ad platform in terms of data and targeting.

That's why companies doing streaming at less than Google's scale can pay Aakami or a company like them to do that, caching copies at datacenters around the world close to the people doing the watching.

In the same way AI will replace bland techno and run of the mill lofi hop hop, it’ll do the same for all the cgi crap Dreamworks puts out twice a year.

AI can copy things that are already copied, but you’ll never get something as paradigm shifting as Toy Story 1.

>With the exception of Netflix, these other companies' apps are similarly buggy and painful to use.

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.

> By that, I mean something where either the dialog or the video (or both) is completely done by AI.

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.

Yeah, even I, who is pretty bullish on AI in general, agree in doubting the premise that AI is going to make movies that are so good that people stop having any interest in older movies.

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.

don’t forget the burning paper bag of shit that is Paramount+ on PS5. There is no shame anymore.

Birdemic 3, deathstalker 4, star wars episode N, star wars episode N+1, star wars non-episode A, star wars non-episode [...]

Yeah, boy, I'm glad humans are making novel stuffs.

This already happens without AI, it's just that studios can only produce so many films given the budget, labor, and time constraints.

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.

It's part of the same phenomenon we see in social media. The first waves of social media and YouTube were predicated on the idea that you either seek out content yourself or view a feed of content you'd already taken action to subscribe to/follow. Services like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube pivoted to go from "pull" where users select content or stay within their own networks, to a "push" model where the algorithm predicts and autoplays content, mostly from strangers, based on highly accurate predictions of virality and eyeball-retaining potential.

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.

Would ABC make more if everyone switched to premium, or if everyone was ad-suppported? Be thorough, include ad sales people, telephone lines, lawyers, etc.

Yeah that is literally all the movies being made by people, unlike AI which has produced groundbreaking creative works.

I agree with that, although for me it's books that I really enjoy currently.

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 LOATHE peacock. I don't know what checks they do at the start of the stream, but they always peg me at 720p or lower resolution despite having over 300mb. Its not an issue on any other streaming app and they give you no option to set it manually. Streams look like a dog's breakfast on my 4k TVs.

By a whisker, I would bet you're right. But only because of your clause 'completely done by AI'. And I think that renders the bet kind of irrelevant.

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.

> 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?

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.

Seems like we should have seen these groundbreaking creative works that have been totally inaccessible to create without AI by now rather than a million "X as a Wes Anderson Movie" trailers. Filmmaking has not been an inaccessible creative endeavor since like the 1910s. Budget price cameras have been with us for a long time. It's a weird AI company invention to suggest there are people who've been shut out of this pursuit for some reason. Creators don't need to wait around for AI to generate slop out of prompts, they can make movies.

I'm willing to modify the bet to "Just one person does all the labor with AI as the primary tool".

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.

I wonder if that's more an issue with them than you. I subscribed to peacock for one month during the Olympics, and it was terrible. Streams frequently were stuck at something super-low 320p, or just halted to that stupid sad cat error page.

Cutesy error pages are cute exactly once, then they're even worse than a minimally viable error page.

If they just wanted to throw this stuff out there at minimal bandwidth costs, a page of .torrent files and a seedbox would get it done for pennies.

"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.

> Yes I exclude that,

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.

> Films are going to look more like fanfiction.net, Bandcamp, ArtStation, and Steam. That's a good thing.

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.

It's gotten better over the past couple of years. Even Disney+ has a lot of issues like some kid shows will play like 10 minutes of end credits after an episode instead of going to the next one. Not sure if that is finally fixed. In general, Netflix is still light-years ahead of the competition.

Maybe the issue is on their side. Their best outcome is you paying for 4k hdr and streaming 720p. Bandwidth is expensive and slow to provision.

Are you behind a CG-NAT? Not all companies have caught up to the fact that one IP is used by multiple customers now.

Things like throttling by IP Address which used to be a viable option is not effective anymore.

> but everything else is thankfully solved.

well, since it's so easy for you, you should apply at Netflix as they can't figure it out.

>or paying netflix to license their technology

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.

Astroturfing pressure groups is a crazy way to describe the bandwidth alliance lol.

> humans are just acting as the director of that AI.

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.

Gotta love how streaming torrents through shady debrid and indexing services with Stremio is a smoother experience than what these megacorporations with massive budgets manage to scrape together.

Is there such a thing as a "HN Vote" post? Because this would be a great vote to put on the front page. The question would be "How much of the production will AI be doing in the movie/TV industries in 10 years?" and these would be the choices:

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.

> 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.

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?

#2, minus the part about AI script writing, and with a caveat that changes "purely AI generated visuals and audio" to something human-driven, AI-accelerated.

You need to be in the YouTube partner program, but that's not just available to big creators.

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.

I don't know about Netflix specifically, but some companies do sell all-in-one package solution to create your own kinda Neflix on prem. Don't know how great these solutions are, but I imagine with sufficient budget they should work ok.

YouTube painful to use compared to Netflix ? Last week I noticed my video froze on netflix while audio moved ahead.

I think so.

> 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.

I don't know if they license it specifically, or if anyone has even approached them about it. I do think it's ridiculous that all of these companies are making their own solutions that are all terrible.

What they really should do is license their content to netflix for a fair price and just let netflix be the service people use.

No need to suspect, they are advertising that openly and are proud of it. Famously, years ago they invented House of Cards TV show by looking at the most popular search tags and picked the most popular ones to select a genre and theme of a new show. It was a story of many articles about Netlix back then.

>> With the exception of Netflix, these other companies' apps are similarly buggy and painful to 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.

> Bandwidth is expensive and slow to provision.

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.

You've got the cart before the horse.

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.

Could be a DRM thing. You might not have a trusted display/decoding device, so it gives you the low res.

Wow, cool! Here's my poll. We'll see if anyone notices. :-)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42955244

> Famously, years ago they invented House of Cards TV show by looking at the most popular search tags and picked the most popular ones to select a genre and theme of a new show

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.

Paramount+ on iOS was terrible the last time I used it, too. I tend to binge Star Trek on flights, so I like to download a bunch of episodes. Paramount+ had such a terrible experience (at least 10% of the time videos would be downright corrupted), I ended up cancelling my standalone subscription and getting it through Apple TV so I could use the Apple TV app.

Why do you think Netflix wants to buy it?

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.

Yup, with the small caveat that the category for the award isn't something silly like "best use of AI in a film". I'm fine if it's like best VFX or whatever, but I'd have a hard time if the awards committee created a new category specifically to give awards for AI.

No, that's not at all what happened. House of Cards was a highly regarded UK TV series from BBC (made in the early 1990s). Like many UK TV series, it was ripe for an American adaptation. Netflix won the bidding war for that adaptation.

Making up "famous" examples doesn't make your case stronger, but the opposite.

Perfect. You're on! :)

No special category, and I'm even willing to bank on it being a category that isn't the moral equivalent of VFX.

Let's remember to check back.

I laughed.

Netflix 4K is some bs in my experience. A 4K file of the same show, pirated, is vastly better quality. Whatever they do to it is just vandalism.

> Let's remember to check back.

:D Probably the hardest part of this wager.

Absolutely, haha :P

>> 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.

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.

It didn't take them this long.

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/...

Actually it seems like region-specific copyright deals are still very much in play. If I visit that playlist from Australia then 14 of the full movies are unavailable and hidden. But VPN'ing through the US shows me the whole set.

>> There is no point buying everything as a streaming provider. It doesn't get you more customers and it costs money.

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.

That's also true of Apple/Amazon/etc.

If you want to make money from a movie, that seems a much better option.

Its just them being cheap. They probably set every one to a max of 720p, hope most people do not realise (cutting down bandwidth costs) and let them set max quality themselves.

Deathstalker 2 is a classic... of sorts...

I suppose the point here is that although the tech may become ubiquitous, it can't make people creative. Previous young people had access to cheap digital video cameras, and the best they could do was Blair Witch. The bottleneck when it comes to good movies is not the technology, it's creatives being any good. There's not a bottled-up reservoir of creative juice waiting to surge forth as soon as friction is reduced, any more than in previous decades.

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.

Yep. I worked for Viaplay, the Swedish streaming "giant". Viaplay chose to "sell out" to Akamai, Level3 and Amazon in return for less CDN staff.

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!

IME Netflix is a close 2nd best after Apple, which I don't think I can distinguish from a 4K BluRay. I've found that the quality depends on the platform a little -- for Netflix the native LG app seems to look best on my LG TV, while Apple looks best on the Apple TV app (perhaps unsurprisingly).

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.

They just need to look at their stock price vs NFLX to realize that people do indeed realize the difference across the stack.

>Could be a DRM thing. You might not have a trusted display/decoding device, so it gives you the low res.

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.

I have about the same number of issues with Netflix as with Youtube (with Youtube being perhaps slightly better).

I agree that eg Disney+ is a bit rougher around the edges.

This is absolutely already a feature of YouTube for creators.

Yes, YouTube fully supports region specific availability and has for a very very long time.

What device are you using? I use Apple TVs, and Apple TV+ is consistently extremely high quality streaming for me. YouTube is incredibly painful to use because their tvOS UI is garbage. Quality's OK, though.

The Apple TV app is 100% the only way to cope with Paramount+. Of all the streaming services I use regularly -- Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Peacock, YouTube -- it's the only one that doesn't work for me more often than not when using the app directly.

4K doesn't really say anything about image quality, just the resolution of the picture, which tells you the theoretical maximum level of visual detail.

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.

Licensing is distinct for FAST and (A)VOD. That is, a service may have acquired the rights to show a specific title on FAST but not AVOD (or vice-versa).

Its not that. I'm on a lg c2 with a modern Chromecast (or whatever name Google is calling it now) plugged in. Its all new stuff.

I'd be happy with 1080p.

Don't think so. Does cgnat use private IP space? I'm not familiar with how it works.

you completely misunderstand what it means to enjoy a film experience.

This misses the forest for the trees.

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.

I'm using an Apple TV (device) to stream Apple TV (the streaming service.) Streaming quality is great, so agree on that. It is the bugginess of the app.

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.

Yes however, the original broadcast contracts may not have clauses in them for streaming services so having to revisit those contracts would be a costly process.

I'm not so sure Paramount are doing it anymore, though. The link in that article leads to Paramount Scares which just has some clips and some rent-or-buy movies.

Who does 6Mbps for 1080p? I thought HD topped out at 3Mbps, and 4K was around the 6+Mbps

Sorta. It's like NAT except it's at your carrier. Multiple customers share the same IP.

If an attack or abuse comes from a CG-NAT address they have to throttle the IP and all the customers behind it.

Honestly I turned the touchpad off within a few minutes of getting my Apple TV

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!)

Twitch is typically 6Mbps+ and 1080p, though with more time to encode you can get the same quality out of fewer bits. Netflix can go up to about 20Mbps for 4K if my searches can be believed, but I didn't test it myself. When I've grabbed videos off Nebula they're a lot bigger than youtube; one here that doesn't even have much motion is 4Mbps at 1080p. And crunchyroll has a lot of 8Mbps at 1080p.

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.

Their 'seek' behavior is also horrendous. IIRC they don't support the standard "click to skip forward 10 seconds" behavior and instead it's either in fast-forward mode or it's not, and in that mode it's impossible to seek to an accuracy of ~1 minute.

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.

My cousin worked at a major network porting programs for rebroadcast (they did some minor updates). They got surprised when a few shows they posted on YouTube got some traction (they became news worthy), getting a decent numbers of views and a check appeared..

Yeah, “a decent video player” feels like something that should be table-stakes commodity stuff, there are certainly a fair number of good open source video player components and toolkits with customizable skins and support for tons of playback formats and protocols. But no, this is actually something billion dollar companies struggle with.

Yes.

And peering with Comcast is almost the same price and transit.

deutsche telekom, Telstra and the Korean Telcos also do this.

Used to be completely free

Some years ago I worked for a company creating streaming platforms for media companies, aka the clunky shit you complain about:-) My experience the clunkyness comes primarily from two things.

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.

But they're doing it in such an unceremonious way... No real curation, no promotion, just an unorganized content dump.

I’m not sure compelling & bountiful AI films and interest in older films are mutually exclusive.

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.

> But for the best experience you want every video to start playing in less than a second.

Even Netflix and Disney+ do not have that. The TV also takes some time to respond.

> With the exception of Netflix,

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.

Netflix is superior to Disney+ in this regard (at least on my TV).

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.

Because the player is only the first step. Then you need all the other stuff like a CDN distribution to get it close enough to all your subscribers/able to handle all the subscribers pulling down video. I'd be shocked if the core player that just shows pixels on the screen is anyones' problem at this point.

Google laid fiber cables across the ocean, they already own the whole infrastructure and rent it out. It's a cost only in the sense that they potentially can't sell as much capacity as without their own traffic going down the pipes.

'That' being DRM?

The UK Channel4 app can't even get the ratio right for whole series of some programs. (Programs that were 4:3 but they warp it the wrong way, and still have big black bars at the margins {I think it's called overscan?})

I was referring to VHS recording which is limited to less-than-broadcast resolutions.

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.

There was a Mario Brothers music video set in a swampy trailer park, actually watched that to the end.

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.

I'm surprised that there isn't a standardized open source web video player which all websites use so users have the same video player experience and features across the web. Usually commercial or "free" video players are bad like JW player or whatever freemium players there are.

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.

The bet is stupid.

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.

Maybe this means they just fired a decent Engineering+Product+Test team.

And incredibly badly designed. Like not supporting type-ahead, so after you hit -> to skip ahead, you have to wait until it streams the next 10 seconds of video to skip over, before hitting -> to skip ahead the next 10 seconds. Forces people to pirate content just so they can view it in vlc.

I've always assumed there was a lot more "more trouble [i.e. time/money] than it's worth" associated with putting up old content in whatever form. As you say, there are a lot of potential complexities and figuring those out for something that is never going to bring in much revenue may not be worth it, however fervent some niche fan base may be.

Shout out to all the devs who never sold their souls.

I don't have any expertise here but my assumption would be the studios have a better way to manage digital content and rights compared to previous. It could very well be they have content available, free of rights, that can be uploaded to YouTube for monetisation. As others have mentioned, there are effectively no hosting or bandwidth costs associated.

Damn man, what is going on at Viaplay now? My former team lead used to work there and went back after he left the place where we worked together.

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'm sure they've got more mature systems in place today. But there's still some threshold of income vs. effort at any company. I freely admit to having no idea what that threshold looks like for a lot of old content--a lot of which was never digitized--at various studios.

I don't know much anymore, I know they run more ads than content and that they're running very lean. A lot of people had to go when the stock tanked. I have some conspiracy theory that "they" wiped the stock harder than deserved to be able to buy back ownership on the cheap...

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...

except all those "consumer friedly" torrent things are the definition of selling one's soul.

In what sense? Leeching?

Except there are only 3 DRM providers, and as a streaming service provider you just wrap the 3 providers libraries and write a few config files.

Jeez that sucks, was it all due to the decision to offload streaming to 3rd parties? How could they not do any cost estimations? It must have been a huge project that lasted months.

> Do you remove the possibility of using motion capture performances, compositing, or other techniques?

These things are "not AI".

Video.js does a pretty good job. Most of these places seem to choose to have a bad experience, by not understanding what they're doing and getting a terrible vendor solution. Often triggered by DRM panic.

Bitrate can be massive with a low quality video so that also doesn't tell you much.

Viaplay started as a side gig to Nordic Entertainment Group so they started in the cloud and never questioned the decision again, I also got the impression that leadership didn't trust the tech competency and they didn't hire to fix it either. CDN providers are arguably better at CDN than we were, but it's just so expensive.

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.

most of the clients are ripped off open source and sold for profit/subscription. and filled to the brim with trojans and adware.

Isn’t that the same as 99% of commercial phone apps?

(Not defending it; I’m just saying it compares favorably with whatever crap is in most non-pirate apps.)

Yeah; of those, Netflix has been the second least reliable for me.

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.

If it’s not a cgnat, your ISP could be throttling everyone that isn’t using a whitelisted site. Try using speedtest.net or fast.com just before streaming, and see if it fixes peacock.

Netflix has been most popular for a bunch of other rather obvious reasons.

Inb4: not my area of expertise, but I worked with a company that was providing data on movie rights. The way I understand it is that it's a Cartesian explosion of complexity under the hood. There are at least rights to a version of the movie and the soundtrack/theme song. They can function independently in a region and are granted exclusively or non-exclusively in a region based on timing.

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.

I can imagine that the DRM part is a difficult problem, however, why is DRM so important and require so much focus? I ask as the end goal of protecting the content is meaningless as I’ve yet to see content that does NOT end up on Pirate sites in perfect quality. (so why put so much effort into drm if it’s going to end up on pirate sites anyway.). Especially if DRM is causing UI issues or slowing down the experience. (I could be wrong about some of this as I’m not in the streamin specific industry.)

Don't underestimate how cost conscious and inept copyright holders are.

> however, why is DRM so important and require so much focus?

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.

> The ratings is because of what the fame David Lynch achieved after making this.

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.

I blame modern software development methodologies which value feature pushing and ceremonies above well working basic functionality.

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?

I would put Disney+ after apple. Both AppleTV+ and Disney+ consistently looks great to me. Netflix is strange as it generally looks good but whatever compression they use does something funny to the picture which makes it look fuzzy and sharp at the same time to me.

I don't get this, I love the touchpad on the Apple TV, makes using it so much nicer than anything else I have tried.

> because they enjoy them

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.

>> I'd say the biggest cost is probably hiring a decent Engineering+Product+Test team

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.

There have been one or two very popular TV series (e.g. Northern Exposure) that the owners were able to eventually get the music rights sorted on. But I'm sure there are a gazillion random TV shows that a handful of people care about for some nostalgic reason that no one is going to go to the trouble to work out.

Don't forget the cost of storage. In the days before streaming, WB used to store (digitized) movies on LTO tapes, which are dirt cheap. The programming software would load up a tape the day before broadcast and transfer the contents to disk.

A streaming service needs to have all offered content available on disk. I can absolutely see WB offloading the storage cost to Google.

I'd imagine the biggest cost might be not hiring a decent engineering team - since then you are probably spending a boatload more on server costs and bandwidth and losing customers due to bugs and glitches

Apple TV+ is great on Roku (have an older 4K box that still has Toslink output). Also liked the experience on a newer Apple TV box that now has buttons for scrolling (only other Apple TV box I've used is the first generation which is touchpad only and I'm not a fan of)

On Roku (actual box not integrated) Peacock has been good quality. Definitely hits 1080P with a decent bitrate. I suspect the software teams only have the bandwidth to focus on a few of the more popular devices (so probably Roku and Apple TV boxes) and others suffer

Nope, the video isn't long enough and wouldn't qualify.

I also agree that AI will stall which is the point of the bet. I also don't think an AI recreation of the Grandmother would see critical acclaim. Lynch already did it.

This exactly.

I guess Netflix owns some of its concent, and could do as they pleases(?). But they still need a uber fast pipeline for the other stuff.

I'm not defending the stupid touchpad because it is indeed awful, but I worry you're not taking advantage of literally its only feature, because you say "lacking the exponential fast forwarding". The only reason I keep that annoying thing enabled at all, or that I don't just have it learn a random "real" remote and use that, is how good the Apple remote is with FF/Rewind. Assuming your streaming app is using the correct "native" video player, you're meant to hit (Center button) to pause/bring up the scrubber, then swipe quickly horizontally across the touchpad to move the playhead in large chunks. It's very accelerated, and if you need to say, rewind a movie from the credits to the beginning, it's about 3 swipes if you're swiping fast and vigorously. If you swipe slowly, on the other hand, you can go a couple minutes at a time.

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.

Bitrate, resolution, and codec are all of course critical, and not knowing all three makes it impossible to judge how good or bad it will look. Sadly the resolution is the only one of the three that's easy to describe to consumers, so here we are.

Stremio is (mostly) open source and doesn't cost a penny and AFAIK has no malware. It does sometimes have some ads, about which they are very open about.

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 is actually the lowest bitrate offering.

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.

>Why do you think Netflix wants to buy it?

Because they previous had a lot of that content before those providers pulled it and created competing systems.

Peacock is terrible. They are, as far as I can tell, the only mainstream service of this sort that actively block Linux users. I can use Netflix, Hulu, Youtube, Disney+, Max, Prime Video, etc. from Linux with zero issues. But Peacock? Nope. Doesn't work, and given that it had worked in the past, it seems like they have taken active measures to block Linux and to close any workarounds that let you use their service from a Linux box. So fuck Peacock. They have some content I would watch, and that I'd be happy to pay for. But they actively reject my business, so fuck 'em.

Weird, I also can’t relate to this at all.

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.

YT is top tier? Oof.

The app is so full of click-me dark patterns, it feels more like an iffy porn site than the product of a major tech corp.

A flood of content has actively devalued media even before AI.

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

I'd argue there is a lot of cost-scale issue.

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.