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

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.

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.

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.

> 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

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.