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

"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."

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.

Got some recommendations?

On youtube , watch Space King

In a similar vein, I remember reading somewhere that creating shows for direct-to-streaming is liberating because, although it is quite similar to TV in that it's telling a story in chunks (usually 30 to 60 minutes) without a guarantee of continuation (renewal), you don't have the primary constraints of traditional television: fitting into a specific time slot, saving time for commercials, and creating hooks that lead neatly into each ad break to get the audience to stick around.

Vimeo has tried to prioritize indie feature discovery from what I can tell. Not sure what its ownership or business is. Also not sure how it compares to (in music) soundcloud's or bandcamp's approaches.

Part of this is that YouTube makes this viable only for creators whose inbound viewers are likely to stay to watch a majority of the content; otherwise, the algorithm penalizes your content for every "bounce." A comedy short that'll attract people who like comedy shorts, and will be over before many people bounce? A long-form science documentary that's likely only going to be clicked by someone who wants to watch a long-form science documentary? Both meet this criterion. But any kind of traditional filmmaking with longer character arcs will be penalized, and that's a really hard thing to see for your creation's primary distribution channel.

This has sorta happened with the backrooms? The creator started via viral YouTube and meme growth, now he’s making a movie with A24.

Sort of happened with the guy who made Astartes. He was a storyboard animator for the Secret Level 40k episode.

You see this often with Apple TV+ shows. Some episodes are only 40~ minutes while the very next one might be 70. They can scope the episode to only include the content that is required for that story and extend the runtime when they need to include extra details or scenes to make everything flow nicely.

For most viewers, the discretion is worthwhile for better storytelling.

I would think this is creating discovery effects specific to indie filmmakers who are doing "a very indie thing that doesn't fit anywhere else" like GP comment said