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

(tedium.co)
641 points shortformblog | 1 comments | 05 Feb 25 14:47 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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timmg ◴[05 Feb 25 15:22 UTC] No.42949719[source]▶
I assume they get "monetization" from Youtube and they don't need to worry about hosting or discovery. Probably better than doing nothing with these films.
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browningstreet ◴[05 Feb 25 15:27 UTC] No.42949826[source]▶
I'm a little surprised there isn't more of this. Building a streaming service is pretty expensive.. a lot of the platforms lost money doing so and really only made it back when they merged into an umbrella of other services.

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.

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duxup ◴[05 Feb 25 15:33 UTC] No.42949930[source]▶
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?

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1. mason55 ◴[05 Feb 25 16:28 UTC] No.42950876{3}[source]▶
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.