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.

Ah, FAST services as referenced by the parent are an entire genre of streaming services that might have slipped under the radar for most Hacker News readers.[1] They’d be off my radar too since I’m not interested in them per se, but for Jason Snell’s excellent Downstream[2] podcast (earlier episodes co-hosted by Julia Alexander) covering basically the business of Hollywood with an emphasis on streaming services and rights.

So this is basically just using YouTube as a FAST service.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_ad-supported_streaming_te...

[2]: https://www.relay.fm/downstream

With AI, this entire vast content library is about to be worthless anyway.

We'll be making more long-form, quality content per month than entire Hollywood production years.

And if you include short form content and slop, it'll be more content per second than entire years.

When faced with infinite content, people will reach for content currently popular in the zeitgeist or content that addresses niche interests. Hollywood never made Steampunk Vampire Hunters of Ganymede, but in the future there will be creators filling every void. There won't be much reason to revisit old catalogues that don't cater to modern audiences unless it's to satisfy curiosity or watch one of the shining diamonds in the rough.

There will be a few legacy titles that endure (Friends, Star Wars), but most of it will be washed away in a sea of infinite attention sinks.

We're about to hit post-scarcity, infinite attention satisfiability. We've already looked over the inflection point, so it doesn't take much imagination to reason what's next.

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Edit: copying my buried comments from below to expand on this.

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I have direct experience with this field.

I've written, directed, and acted in independent films. I've worked on everything from three person crews all the way up to 200 person shots. Even mocap and virtual production.

We're now developing film and VFX tools for individual artists, and the world is full of artists. It's been starved for films, however. The studio production system only had so much annual capacity per year, and most creators never get the opportunity to helm a project of their own.

You're not crying over the accessibility of digital art, digital music, indie games, or writing.

Film production and distribution has been bottlenecked at the studio level for far too long due to capital, logistics, and (previously) distribution barriers. That's all changing now.

Films are going to look more like fanfiction.net, Bandcamp, ArtStation, and Steam. That's a good thing.

I have friends in IATSE (film crew union) and AI is going to hurt their work. The nature of work changes, and new opportunities arise. But what's hurting them right now is that film productions are being offshored to Europe and Asia to break up their unions and bank on cheaper local labor. Production in Atlanta is one sixth of what it was just a few years ago.

I also have friends who write and direct that are looking at this as their big chance to build their own audience.

Art doesnt cease to be art when new forms of art are materializing. Its up to the viewer.

That wasn't the argument.

The argument is that few will watch the majority of WB's back catalogue, because their time is being spent with all the other attention sinks.

This places a monetary value on the content, not a social or cultural value.

I absolutely agree.

It’s also a silly to believe that because it’s old it’s culturally significant. There’s plenty of ancient dross in the back catalogues.

"Culturally significant" is the wrong metric, and shows that you don't really understand why people watch what they watch.

People watch all sorts of things, from all different time periods, because they enjoy them. Sometimes those things are "culturally significant", but I'd expect that's not the most common case. Sometimes those things are B-movies from the '70s or brain-candy sitcoms from the '90s.