←back to thread

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: 0.211s | source
Show context
timmg ◴[05 Feb 25 15:22 UTC] No.42949719[source]▶
I assume they get "monetization" from Youtube and they don't need to worry about hosting or discovery. Probably better than doing nothing with these films.
replies(5): >>42949781 #>>42949826 #>>42950060 #>>42957115 #>>42963845 #
bluedevil2k ◴[05 Feb 25 15:40 UTC] No.42950060[source]▶
The only 2 companies that made money during the “streaming wars” were Netflix, which had the infrastructure in place already and didn’t need to build anything from scratch, and Sony, which decided not to build any streaming service and just license all its content out. Seems WBD is following the lead of a winner.

* https://www.yahoo.com/tech/sony-succeeded-becoming-powerful-...

replies(4): >>42950285 #>>42950752 #>>42953195 #>>42959225 #
827a ◴[06 Feb 25 04:54 UTC] No.42959225[source]▶
Much like Spotify; it took them many, many years to achieve only a 7% profit margin. Meanwhile, UMG runs at 16%.

The only company that actually makes good money from being a content middleman is, somehow, YouTube. I don't know how they do it. YouTube is among the greatest businesses in human history.

replies(2): >>42960393 #>>42964894 #
1. yurishimo ◴[06 Feb 25 08:45 UTC] No.42960393[source]▶
Because YouTube has found a way to monetize the work of it's content creators. Online influencers are incentivized to make videos to get paid and YouTube has reduced their costs enough to make it worthwhile.

In addition to that, whenever users are just starting out, their videos still get ad rolls but the creator doesn't get any money. That's millions of new videos every day that Youtube can monetize until those creators are eligible to collect the checks for themself (if ever).

Also, YouTube does aggressive caching of very old videos that have very few views. You might need to wait 10 seconds for YT to fetch the video from cold storage before watching, but in the grand scheme of things, it's worth it to them.