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

(tedium.co)
641 points shortformblog | 5 comments | 05 Feb 25 14:47 UTC | HN request time: 0.331s | 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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1. ghaff ◴[06 Feb 25 13:20 UTC] No.42962040[source]▶
I've always assumed there was a lot more "more trouble [i.e. time/money] than it's worth" associated with putting up old content in whatever form. As you say, there are a lot of potential complexities and figuring those out for something that is never going to bring in much revenue may not be worth it, however fervent some niche fan base may be.
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2. CraigRood ◴[06 Feb 25 13:44 UTC] No.42962212[source]▶
I don't have any expertise here but my assumption would be the studios have a better way to manage digital content and rights compared to previous. It could very well be they have content available, free of rights, that can be uploaded to YouTube for monetisation. As others have mentioned, there are effectively no hosting or bandwidth costs associated.
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3. ghaff ◴[06 Feb 25 13:50 UTC] No.42962266[source]▶
I'm sure they've got more mature systems in place today. But there's still some threshold of income vs. effort at any company. I freely admit to having no idea what that threshold looks like for a lot of old content--a lot of which was never digitized--at various studios.
4. VTimofeenko ◴[06 Feb 25 17:54 UTC] No.42964765[source]▶
Inb4: not my area of expertise, but I worked with a company that was providing data on movie rights. The way I understand it is that it's a Cartesian explosion of complexity under the hood. There are at least rights to a version of the movie and the soundtrack/theme song. They can function independently in a region and are granted exclusively or non-exclusively in a region based on timing.

As a bit of a contrived example, you want to distribute Superman 4 in China for a year. You have to secure rights to the film, but you cannot secure rights to the score from the US version as the license is not compatible. You have to get a license-compatible score and make sure the movie complies with the Chinese censorship. And the licensing periods have to overlap.

Multiply that by however many regions you want to distribute the movie in and add accounting complexity for each region.

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5. ghaff ◴[06 Feb 25 19:21 UTC] No.42965571{3}[source]▶
There have been one or two very popular TV series (e.g. Northern Exposure) that the owners were able to eventually get the music rights sorted on. But I'm sure there are a gazillion random TV shows that a handful of people care about for some nostalgic reason that no one is going to go to the trouble to work out.