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

There was a time fairly early in Netflix's streaming era when all the studios were just dumping their old back catalogs on Netflix to get some revenue from 'dead content' that I thought "Wow, someday soon pretty much all the old content will just be available on a central streaming service. The future will be good."

Then the stock market started inflating the value of streamers because of ARR projections and studios adopted a gold rush mentality, pulled back all their content and each tried to launch their own service. Of course, this quickly fragmented the streaming market as few consumers would subscribe to more than one or two services at a time. As stock valuations dropped back to reality, the server plus bandwidth costs started piling up and the also-ran streaming services became break-even boat anchors for most studios.

Now we're left with the cultural 'worst of all worlds'. A dozen inaccessible walled gardens each neglected by their owners and no easy, central way to find and watch an old, low-value film.

Most things are on Amazon if you’re willing to pay for them individually. It’s more buffet style streaming services that splintered.

Per movie may seem expensive, but at the low end of hours per month watch time streaming services are a bad deal.

I don't like buying DRM-encumbered digital copies. I'm OK with streaming subscriptions because their catalogues are fundamentally ephemeral, but if I buy a movie I want to know I can keep it forever, even if the platform I bought it from disappears entirely.

To that end, I only buy physical media that can be copied and have its DRM removed. On the plus side, Blu-Ray turns 20 next year and still provides better image quality than your typical 1080p stream.

I get you, but to be clear I was referring to renting movies rather than purchasing them.

It’s not a service I use, but it’s surprisingly close to the anything anywhere anytime ideal.

I had thought that, until recently I went to watch Spinal Tap with my son, and it's not apparently on Prime Video, even for pay. Which is odd, because I'm pretty sure I previously "bought" it there.

I think I would rather eat glass than rent a movie on Amazon Prime for $3.99. I'm so sick of those polluting the search on there.

Yep, we really went from "everything will be available in one place!" to "good luck remembering which service has what, if it's even still there"

we're trying to cut back to only Disney+ for kids and we use prime video for us. Amazon's genius "take this prime video credit for slow shipping" has us renting movies maybe once a week and it's much better value for us than all subscriptions services that get no playtime.

Apple has a rental model like this as well, dating back to the iPod Video days. It still exists for the AppleTV.

For people who only watch a couple movies per month, this is cheaper, with more variety, than any streaming service. While also avoiding the trap of forgotten subscriptions that aren’t being used.

> ...soon pretty much all the old content will just be available on a central streaming service. The future will be good.

I'll buy a TV once any show ever made is available right now for $1 dollar.

During the '00s, I thought surely that'd be in the '10s. Oh well. The '30s aren't so far away.

i’ve heard that another reason every studio started their own service was to make it easier to cook the books with profits and losses between the content and the costs of the service