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

There was a time fairly early in Netflix's streaming era when all the studios were just dumping their old back catalogs on Netflix to get some revenue from 'dead content' that I thought "Wow, someday soon pretty much all the old content will just be available on a central streaming service. The future will be good."

Then the stock market started inflating the value of streamers because of ARR projections and studios adopted a gold rush mentality, pulled back all their content and each tried to launch their own service. Of course, this quickly fragmented the streaming market as few consumers would subscribe to more than one or two services at a time. As stock valuations dropped back to reality, the server plus bandwidth costs started piling up and the also-ran streaming services became break-even boat anchors for most studios.

Now we're left with the cultural 'worst of all worlds'. A dozen inaccessible walled gardens each neglected by their owners and no easy, central way to find and watch an old, low-value film.

Most things are on Amazon if you’re willing to pay for them individually. It’s more buffet style streaming services that splintered.

Per movie may seem expensive, but at the low end of hours per month watch time streaming services are a bad deal.