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: 0.402s | 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]▶

>>42950057 #

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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1. myself248 ◴[05 Feb 25 20:03 UTC] No.42954303[source]▶

>>42950694 #

If they just wanted to throw this stuff out there at minimal bandwidth costs, a page of .torrent files and a seedbox would get it done for pennies.

"Streaming", who gives a hoot, just download it like everything else. "Service" can take a hike, video player software already exists and all the UI work is done. That part is utterly superfluous.

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