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

(tedium.co)
641 points shortformblog | 3 comments | 05 Feb 25 14:47 UTC | HN request time: 1.296s | 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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1. xattt ◴[05 Feb 25 16:57 UTC] No.42951447[source]▶
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

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2. nix0n ◴[05 Feb 25 18:42 UTC] No.42953159[source]▶
> 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.

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3. xattt ◴[06 Feb 25 09:44 UTC] No.42960739[source]▶
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.