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.

>> 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.

Judging from the clunky, buggy, nonsensical experiences on 2nd tier streaming services (i.e., everything except Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Disney+, Max), I'd say the biggest cost is probably hiring a decent Engineering+Product+Test team. There are complexities here, like making these things work on different TV brands, versions, older models, etc.

Pushing all the complexity to YT seems like a total no-brainer.

> Judging from the clunky, buggy, nonsensical experiences on 2nd tier streaming services (i.e., everything except Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Disney+, Max)

With the exception of Netflix, these other companies' apps are similarly buggy and painful to use. I run into an at least issue daily (usually multiple times a day) in every streaming app I use except Netflix.

I LOATHE peacock. I don't know what checks they do at the start of the stream, but they always peg me at 720p or lower resolution despite having over 300mb. Its not an issue on any other streaming app and they give you no option to set it manually. Streams look like a dog's breakfast on my 4k TVs.

Could be a DRM thing. You might not have a trusted display/decoding device, so it gives you the low res.

>Could be a DRM thing. You might not have a trusted display/decoding device, so it gives you the low res.

True, but that is why this is a hard engineering challenge -- there are a lot of variations on client-side devices which need to be supported well. Upgrade cycles for TVs is 3x that of phones, is my guess.