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

(tedium.co)
641 points shortformblog | 2 comments | 05 Feb 25 14:47 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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lxgr ◴[05 Feb 25 15:40 UTC] No.42950057[source]▶
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.

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SteveNuts ◴[05 Feb 25 16:17 UTC] No.42950694[source]▶
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.
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scarab92 ◴[05 Feb 25 16:28 UTC] No.42950879[source]▶
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.
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1. mschuster91 ◴[05 Feb 25 16:31 UTC] No.42950933[source]▶
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.
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2. sitkack ◴[05 Feb 25 17:52 UTC] No.42952379[source]▶
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...