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

(tedium.co)
641 points shortformblog | 4 comments | 05 Feb 25 14:47 UTC | HN request time: 0.276s | 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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vlan0 ◴[05 Feb 25 16:24 UTC] No.42950809[source]▶
Bandwidth is a part, but that’s an easy hurdle. But running a CDN at that scale is gonna require experience and truck load of money. The juice really has to be worth the squeeze.

Similar to running on-prep vs cloud.

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1. dylan604 ◴[05 Feb 25 17:01 UTC] No.42951543[source]▶
> But running a CDN at that scale is gonna require experience and truck load of money

Take Netflix for example. Their CDN at scale is pretty good for VOD type of delivery, but they continue to get it wrong for live event streaming. Even Twit..er, X falls down with their large event live streaming.

Adding the "live" component makes everything just that much harder

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2. ta1243 ◴[05 Feb 25 18:08 UTC] No.42952651[source]▶
> they continue to get it wrong for live event streaming

And truly live (which means probably under 10 seconds from lens to viewer - i.e. the time it takes for the "X win" notification to pop up on your phone) is even harder than traditional "live" in the 40-60 second window.

Ideally you want all viewer to view it at the same time (so when next-door are cheering on a feed 3 seconds ahead of you it's not spoilt).

3. Jakob ◴[05 Feb 25 18:46 UTC] No.42953224[source]▶
It’s actually not harder thanks to HLS: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming

Live streaming with HLS is equal to distributing static files and can be very low latency.

If you need to go below 3s of latency, yes it becomes harder, but everything else is thankfully solved.

The bigger issue with live streaming are the peaks: 0 views in one second and millions in the next. Even with static content delivery that leads to all kinds of issues.

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4. dylan604 ◴[05 Feb 25 20:22 UTC] No.42954569[source]▶
> but everything else is thankfully solved.

well, since it's so easy for you, you should apply at Netflix as they can't figure it out.