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

(tedium.co)
641 points shortformblog | 3 comments | 05 Feb 25 14:47 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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]▶
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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carlhjerpe ◴[06 Feb 25 00:04 UTC] No.42957205[source]▶
Yep. I worked for Viaplay, the Swedish streaming "giant". Viaplay chose to "sell out" to Akamai, Level3 and Amazon in return for less CDN staff.

Viaplay went -95% a month after my intuition made me leave. The problem was that the more users used the platform the more the users cost, linearly. They limited many streams to 720, which is a joke in 2020s.

Netflix has openconnect, essentially a CDN in every big ISPs network, they can do 100g HTTPS per port!

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DanielHB ◴[06 Feb 25 13:45 UTC] No.42962222[source]▶
Damn man, what is going on at Viaplay now? My former team lead used to work there and went back after he left the place where we worked together.

This was my intuition as well, unless you are doing B2B (with billing proportional to the streaming) you have to do the hosting yourself.

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1. carlhjerpe ◴[06 Feb 25 13:51 UTC] No.42962273[source]▶
I don't know much anymore, I know they run more ads than content and that they're running very lean. A lot of people had to go when the stock tanked. I have some conspiracy theory that "they" wiped the stock harder than deserved to be able to buy back ownership on the cheap...

I had to deal with Viaplay HR recently to get some documents out, took a month to get ahold of someone who could do it...

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2. DanielHB ◴[06 Feb 25 15:12 UTC] No.42963108[source]▶
Jeez that sucks, was it all due to the decision to offload streaming to 3rd parties? How could they not do any cost estimations? It must have been a huge project that lasted months.
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3. carlhjerpe ◴[06 Feb 25 15:40 UTC] No.42963399[source]▶
Viaplay started as a side gig to Nordic Entertainment Group so they started in the cloud and never questioned the decision again, I also got the impression that leadership didn't trust the tech competency and they didn't hire to fix it either. CDN providers are arguably better at CDN than we were, but it's just so expensive.

Regarding why the company tanked, I think it was just a part of a bigger problem with inefficient operations, bloat and also going all-in investing in sports without acquiring enough customers.

The Viaplay app(s) are quite bad so people find other ways to watch what they want.