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

Is it really following the lead of a winner if you started by building your own failing streaming service, then buying another streaming service and merging them, and only then starting to license out content?

Sure - that's why Sony is the winner. Other companies tried other things and lost. Now they see what the winner did and they're following their lead.

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.

Warner Bros didn't buy out Discovery, other way around really. In return for taking on loads of debt, Discovery got ownership of WB.

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.

Max has gone to crap since the merger though. They cancelled a lot of the quality content and added a bunch of cheap and awful crap like reality shows to the service. It's like someone bought a Rolls Royce and riced it out.

Agreed on all counts, Discovery is the company I was referring to and Discovery+ was the 'failing' platform, not HBO Max. Though to be fair my recollection was hazy and the story around Discovery+ is not that simple given that it has stuck around post merge and is profitable according to Zaslav. I don't really trust his definition of profitable given his general love for accounting fuckery but the fact that its running is something.

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.

It was ATT that fired all the old HBO bosses that curated for quality. They just dumped their failed experiment onto Discovery to squeeze out whatever was left.