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.
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.
Gotta love how streaming torrents through shady debrid and indexing services with Stremio is a smoother experience than what these megacorporations with massive budgets manage to scrape together.
Not sure where this come from, I have been unsubscribed for a few months so my experience is not current but back in mid 2024 I got video not showing up with some obscure error codes once in a while.
Yeah; of those, Netflix has been the second least reliable for me.
It is a bit better now.
I think part of the problem is their dumb microservices architecture. They operate something like 10,000 microservices and different devices talk to different subsets of those.
On our old, cheap roku stick, they regularly would produce “could not stream” errors or fallback to screenshots instead of trailers (which was actually better!) more often than not. The website would be fine, and no one else I know noticed the outages.
The worst thing is that I’ve worked at places that have moron middle managers that actually decided to emulate this and moved to microservices. It wasted years of my life at work.
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.
If it’s not a cgnat, your ISP could be throttling everyone that isn’t using a whitelisted site. Try using speedtest.net or fast.com just before streaming, and see if it fixes peacock.
Their 'seek' behavior is also horrendous. IIRC they don't support the standard "click to skip forward 10 seconds" behavior and instead it's either in fast-forward mode or it's not, and in that mode it's impossible to seek to an accuracy of ~1 minute.
Video player controls have been a solved problem for something like several decades. It's actually impressive that they managed to screw it up so badly.
Its just them being cheap. They probably set every one to a max of 720p, hope most people do not realise (cutting down bandwidth costs) and let them set max quality themselves.
I wonder if that's more an issue with them than you. I subscribed to peacock for one month during the Olympics, and it was terrible. Streams frequently were stuck at something super-low 320p, or just halted to that stupid sad cat error page.
Cutesy error pages are cute exactly once, then they're even worse than a minimally viable error page.
>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.
4K doesn't really say anything about image quality, just the resolution of the picture, which tells you the theoretical maximum level of visual detail.
Focusing on resolution is like asking "how strong is one meter of rope" without talking about the composition of the rope.
With streaming video, image quality ultimately comes down to the codec and the bitrate. They probably use a relatively low bitrate regardless of codec.
IME Netflix is a close 2nd best after Apple, which I don't think I can distinguish from a 4K BluRay. I've found that the quality depends on the platform a little -- for Netflix the native LG app seems to look best on my LG TV, while Apple looks best on the Apple TV app (perhaps unsurprisingly).
Amazon Prime 4K HDR on the other hand looks like garbage on every platform I've used -- the compression is unbearable in any dark scene.
Not enough to hurt a paid service. Let's say 6Mbps for pretty solid 1080p. And at peak maybe we have .5 streams per account going simultaneously (I bet the real number is significantly lower). So we need 3Mbps per account. How much does a Mbps cost? "Across key cities in the U.S. and Europe, 400 GigE prices range from $0.07 to $0.08 per Mbps."
Peacock doesn't even offer 4K most of the time or on the olympics, but for services that do a $1 upcharge should be more than enough to cover the bandwidth difference.
Twitch is typically 6Mbps+ and 1080p, though with more time to encode you can get the same quality out of fewer bits. Netflix can go up to about 20Mbps for 4K if my searches can be believed, but I didn't test it myself. When I've grabbed videos off Nebula they're a lot bigger than youtube; one here that doesn't even have much motion is 4Mbps at 1080p. And crunchyroll has a lot of 8Mbps at 1080p.
But acceptable quality can definitely go smaller. Especially if "acceptable" is judged by the significant compression artifacts I see on actual cable TV all the time.
>> With the exception of Netflix, these other companies' apps are similarly buggy and painful to use.
I agree -- if I could separate these out into 3 categories rather than 2, Netflix/YT would be in a class of their own, way ahead of the pack.
I am constantly surprised how Apple TV offers such a poor experience despite their excellence in Product Management in other product areas. I was watching Apple TV last night and my wife and I slogged thru the recap and intro because we were so afraid of the app chocking on the "Skip" button.
Aside from Apple, which seems to be a Product Management issue, I find other platforms to bucket into two areas:
1. Poor performance, probably due to bad threading and poor cacheing
2. Incompatibility with older TVs. TVs last 8-10yrs easily these days, and features have topped off so people do not upgrade. This means you have a LOT of target builds and compatibility to check and I dont think they test all the possible builds.
What device are you using? I use Apple TVs, and Apple TV+ is consistently extremely high quality streaming for me. YouTube is incredibly painful to use because their tvOS UI is garbage. Quality's OK, though.
I'm using an Apple TV (device) to stream Apple TV (the streaming service.) Streaming quality is great, so agree on that. It is the bugginess of the app.
For example, with the Apple TV native remote, the silly touchpad is super clunky, painfully lacking the exponential fast forwarding i'm so used to with better services. The experience with the Samsung remote is very buggy. For example, when the "Dismiss" or "Skip" button shows up, the focus isnt the button, so you press it and the show stops and goes back to the main screen.
The buttons dont properly highlight when scrolling, the difference is so subtle it is hard to know what you are selecting (or not)
With the remote, it is easy to over or underscroll because of the sensitivity of the touchpad.
The UK Channel4 app can't even get the ratio right for whole series of some programs. (Programs that were 4:3 but they warp it the wrong way, and still have big black bars at the margins {I think it's called overscan?})
And incredibly badly designed. Like not supporting type-ahead, so after you hit -> to skip ahead, you have to wait until it streams the next 10 seconds of video to skip over, before hitting -> to skip ahead the next 10 seconds. Forces people to pirate content just so they can view it in vlc.
>With the exception of Netflix, these other companies' apps are similarly buggy and painful to use.
Yeah it's really annoying that they all recreated the wheel instead of just playing ball with netflix or paying netflix to license their technology. The only feature I miss from another service is that x-ray view stuff that Amazon has to let you know who is in a scene.
Does Netflix license their technology to anyone? I know of examples like BAMTech, although I don't even know if they still take on outside clients or just do Disney now. I get that their might be good options to license and that fewer companies should build crappy in-house products, but is Netflix one of them?
From Netflix's perspective, it's not clear to me that the payment for licensing technology to e.g. NBC is worth it, versus hoping that they end up with an inferior product, especially when they're competing with each other for customers and licensed content.
I don't know if they license it specifically, or if anyone has even approached them about it. I do think it's ridiculous that all of these companies are making their own solutions that are all terrible.
What they really should do is license their content to netflix for a fair price and just let netflix be the service people use.
There is no point buying everything as a streaming provider. It doesn't get you more customers and it costs money.
Heck, Apple will not even let you put up anything on the iTunes store to purchase - they have to be very confident it will recoup their costs for encoding, ingest time etc etc.
>> There is no point buying everything as a streaming provider. It doesn't get you more customers and it costs money.
The way Amazon prime does it is much like a traditional cable provider -- you can opt into channels (e.g., Hallmark channel) for additional fees per month. Everything purchased appears on Amazon as a universal bucket of content, same UI same everything. Amazon appears to handle the tech and billing. As a consumer, it is beautiful -- you can subscribe and unsubscribe from services monthly, rather than waiting for some once-every-3-yrs renewal contract. You can do everything online rather than waiting an hour for customer service. And thank heavens you dont need to install some random half-baked streaming "App" via the Samsung TV App store.
I'm assuming Amazon takes a cut of the monthly fee. If the MRR of the monthly cut Amazon gets is higher than the cost to deliver, it is a first order win. I assume the marginal engineering work is trivial. I also assume the only marginal costs are the extra metered cost of bandwidth, storage, etc.
I do think there is an issue though -- if the cost of the bundler (Amazon in this case) gets too high, I can see consumers scared off by this ever-increasing bill (Imagine you had a $50/mo netflix bill for example.) Of course, for Amazon this isnt a problem since practically every human I know has a load of random Amazon Marketplace charges on their credit card already they cannot reconcile anyway.
>> From Netflix's perspective, it's not clear to me that the payment for licensing technology to e.g. NBC is worth it, versus hoping that they end up with an inferior product, especially when they're competing with each other for customers and licensed content.
Apple and Amazon Prime and Youtube seem to enable other services via their platforms, presumably for a cut. If the cut is large enough, seems like a good business move for Netflix also -- let the content owners focus on their business rather than some random broadcasting company trying to hire AWS infrastructure engineers and 3rd party platform testing experts.
I don't know about Netflix specifically, but some companies do sell all-in-one package solution to create your own kinda Neflix on prem. Don't know how great these solutions are, but I imagine with sufficient budget they should work ok.
Some years ago I worked for a company creating streaming platforms for media companies, aka the clunky shit you complain about:-) My experience the clunkyness comes primarily from two things.
1: Every customer wants their own twist. It is not enough to create an awesome video player app and reskin it, no they all want to be special.
2: Getting the last 5% takes twice as much work as the first 95%. Probably even more.
It's quite doable for 'normal' engineers to make a steaming platform. You need to get the video files out there on some CDN, you need some service for the DRM keys (which needs to scale, and handle the different access packages), and you probably want some history and profile stuff. Easy enough. But for the best experience you want every video to start playing in less than a second. That means getting those starting video segments as close as possible to the customer, it means optimizing that DRM key delivery, and optimizing the player so it just gets that video pushed to the screen ASAP.
I can imagine that the DRM part is a difficult problem, however, why is DRM so important and require so much focus? I ask as the end goal of protecting the content is meaningless as I’ve yet to see content that does NOT end up on Pirate sites in perfect quality. (so why put so much effort into drm if it’s going to end up on pirate sites anyway.). Especially if DRM is causing UI issues or slowing down the experience.
(I could be wrong about some of this as I’m not in the streamin specific industry.)
Netflix is superior to Disney+ in this regard (at least on my TV).
And on my TV Netflix manages sub-second (at least sometimes). IDK how. Maybe they somehow give me the DRM keys ahead of time? Maybe everything in the "continue watching" is pre-approved? Maybe the first couple of seconds are handled differently, maybe they are not DRM protected? Maybe the netflix intro logo thingy is cached locally, and then stuff happends in the background? It is after all more pleasant to hear the intro sound that watch a spinning loading-thingy. Maybe as I move the selection across stuff they pre-emptively fetch the first seconds? In some cases it also seems to start auto-playing in the background, so the only thing that happends when I press a selection is that the GUI overlay dissapears.
Yeah, “a decent video player” feels like something that should be table-stakes commodity stuff, there are certainly a fair number of good open source video player components and toolkits with customizable skins and support for tons of playback formats and protocols. But no, this is actually something billion dollar companies struggle with.
I'm surprised that there isn't a standardized open source web video player which all websites use so users have the same video player experience and features across the web. Usually commercial or "free" video players are bad like JW player or whatever freemium players there are.
There are open source HTML players tho but they are not as powerful and feature rich as YouTube player.
I remember watching IGN gaming videos on their website's player and the experience was horrible. Tbh idk what's the best open source video player out there right now.
Video.js does a pretty good job. Most of these places seem to choose to have a bad experience, by not understanding what they're doing and getting a terrible vendor solution. Often triggered by DRM panic.
Because the player is only the first step. Then you need all the other stuff like a CDN distribution to get it close enough to all your subscribers/able to handle all the subscribers pulling down video. I'd be shocked if the core player that just shows pixels on the screen is anyones' problem at this point.
It's gotten better over the past couple of years. Even Disney+ has a lot of issues like some kid shows will play like 10 minutes of end credits after an episode instead of going to the next one. Not sure if that is finally fixed. In general, Netflix is still light-years ahead of the competition.
Paramount+ on iOS was terrible the last time I used it, too. I tend to binge Star Trek on flights, so I like to download a bunch of episodes. Paramount+ had such a terrible experience (at least 10% of the time videos would be downright corrupted), I ended up cancelling my standalone subscription and getting it through Apple TV so I could use the Apple TV app.
The Apple TV app is 100% the only way to cope with Paramount+. Of all the streaming services I use regularly -- Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Peacock, YouTube -- it's the only one that doesn't work for me more often than not when using the app directly.
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.
YouTube serving content with ads would be more AVOD (on-demand with ads) vs FAST. FAST typically means a linear feed programmed to play specific content at specific time just like tuning into a channel on OTA or cable networks.
if it is on-demand, then it is AVOD. A company that started as FAST might have pivoted or decided to release the content they used to program their FAST channel as AVOD as well.
I've personally been involved in doing this very thing, but just look at the apps for like Max where they have their linear channel offerings within the same UI as their VOD. While Max isn't ad supported, it's a similar concept.
Licensing is distinct for FAST and (A)VOD. That is, a service may have acquired the rights to show a specific title on FAST but not AVOD (or vice-versa).
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.
Tell you what, let's make a bet. I'll bet you $100 that there will not be a successful long form (more than 20 minutes) AI production in the next 10 years.
By that, I mean something where either the dialog or the video (or both) is completely done by AI. By successful, let's say something that wins a non-AI award (For example, an Oscar or Emmy) or receives something like a 70% positive review on rotten tomatoes, IMDB, or some other metacritic platform that is not specifically made for reviewing AI art.
I do not believe the AI will live up to the hype of "We'll be making more long-form, quality content per month than entire Hollywood production years."
I think we'll see long form AI, I don't think it will be high quality or even something that most people want to watch. The only people that will want to watch that sort of AI slop are AI enthusiasts who want AI to be amazing.
By a whisker, I would bet you're right. But only because of your clause 'completely done by AI'. And I think that renders the bet kind of irrelevant.
I would also bet that sometime in the next 10 years, we'll have a masterpiece of cinema on our hands where the heavy lifting (visuals, sound, even screenwriting) was largely done by an AI, helpfully nudged and curated at important moments by human experts. Or, by just one person.
I'm willing to modify the bet to "Just one person does all the labor with AI as the primary tool".
What I meant by "completely done by AI" is that AI is doing the vast majority of the heavy lifting. Sound, visuals, script and ultimately humans are just acting as the director of that AI.
In otherwords, a masterpiece of cinema created by one person and AI prompts. Masterpiece being judged by the above success criteria. I won't accept some spam film that an AI magazine touts as being a masterpiece.
Anyone could make something along those lines right now with AI tools. The ratings is because of what the fame David Lynch achieved after making this.
AI video is going to stall bad because it is just too expensive and what we have now is complete trash. Sora is such a massive disappointment to anyone who was interested in doing exactly what is being described.
Is there such a thing as a "HN Vote" post? Because this would be a great vote to put on the front page. The question would be "How much of the production will AI be doing in the movie/TV industries in 10 years?" and these would be the choices:
1) Everything. A single prompt will generate a full-length, high quality movie.
2) One person will be able to spend a few weeks or months to produce a high quality movie using purely AI generated visuals and audio, with at least part of the script written by AI.
3) AI will never replace some aspects of high quality movies, although it's not quite clear yet which aspects. It could be writing, acting, directing, or something else.
4) AI will never replace most aspects of high quality movies.
5) Society will rebel against any form of AI in movies; it doesn't matter how good AI gets, nobody will watch movies touched in any way by AI.
#2, minus the part about AI script writing, and with a caveat that changes "purely AI generated visuals and audio" to something human-driven, AI-accelerated.
> humans are just acting as the director of that AI.
My pro-AI director friends tell me this is ultimately what they've been doing with humans all along. Sometimes he humans don't give them what they're looking for, so they ask again. And they have to fit within logistical and budgetary constraints.
> By that, I mean something where either the dialog or the video (or both) is completely done by AI.
I don't think LLMs can write nuanced character arcs, so let's not include them.
On the subject of the visuals being completely AI, we need to be able to steer the video with more than just text prompts. Do you remove the possibility of using motion capture performances, compositing, or other techniques?
I think we'll see 100% non-photon, non-CG visuals. I just think those performances will be human and the films will have a very human touch.
If you can make that adjustment, then I think we have a bet.
AI is just a tool. And artists are going to use the tools that can get the job done.
> On the subject of the visuals being completely AI, we need to be able to steer the video with more than just text prompts. Do you remove the possibility of using motion capture performances, compositing, or other techniques?
Yes I exclude that, because the primary reason to say "We'll be making more long-form, quality content per month than entire Hollywood production years." is that AI has eliminated or vastly eliminated the need for human actors. I'd accept a model trained on motion data or whatever, but I do not think something that augmenting that visual input data counts towards actually reducing production costs and speeding up the process of creating media.
I'd accept modifications to the bet that would still allow for rapid media production. If the human staffing is virtually identical to what it is today then that's not AI actually reducing costs. Hence, AI needing to do the majority of the labor.
For example of what I'd accept, a 2 person team that creates a 20+ minute ensemble film in less than a month or 2 that meets the success criteria above. I'd reject it if the film is "Watch ted go insane in this room" (I think for obvious reasons).
> I think we'll see 100% non-photon, non-CG visuals. I just think those performances will be human and the films will have a very human touch.
We already have that AFAIK. But again, I don't think that's a huge cost or time savings.
> AI is just a tool. And artists are going to use the tools that can get the job done.
I agree, it is a tool. I disagree with claims of how much content it will ultimately enable to be produced.
So humans steering diffusion is off limits? No Krea, no Invoke, no articulated humans?
It's like you're taking away Premiere or Final Cut here. Text prompts are not the currency of AI film. Controllability levers are essential to this whole endeavor.
> I do not think something that augmenting that input data counts towards actually reducing production costs and speeding up the process of creating media.
You haven't spent much time on set, then. An animator can do a performance capture on their webcam and adjust the IK. That's way different than booking a sound stage, renting an Arri Alexa and lenses, and bringing out a whole cast and crew. Set dec, wardrobe, makeup, lighting versus the moral equivalent of a Kinect and a garage studio.
My 6 AM call times, early mornings climbing up to the top shelf of the prop house to grab random tubas and statues, and signing countless legal forms and insurance paperwork all beg to differ with your claims here.
> AI has eliminated or vastly eliminated the need for human actors.
I don't think it necessitates this at all. Kids are going to be flocking to the media to turn themselves into anime VTubers and Han Solos and furries and whatever they can dream up.
Artists want to art. They're going to flock to this. We're going to have to open up the tech for that reason alone.
I'm sure fast moving marketers and the cottage industry of corporate workplace training videos won't use humans, but the creative side will. ElevenLabs is great, but there's also a reason why they hired Chris Pratt, Anya-Taylor Joy, and Jack Black in the Mario movie.
> For example of what I'd accept, a 2 person team that creates a 20+ minute ensemble film in less than a month or 2 that meets the success criteria above.
I'll posit this: a two person team will make a better Star Wars, a better Lord of the Rings, a better Game of Thrones. An ensemble cast of actors piloting AI diffusion characters (or whatever future techniques emerge) will make a film as well acted as Glengarry Glen Ross. Perhaps even set in some fantasy or sci-fi landscape. I bet that we'll have a thousand Zach Hadels, Vivienne Medranos, and Joel Havers finding massive audiences with their small footprint studios, making anime, cartoons, lifelike fantasy, lifelike science fiction, period dramas, and more. And that AI tools will be the linchpin of this creative explosion.
> I'll posit this: a two person team will make a better Star Wars, a better Lord of the Rings, a better Game of Thrones. An ensemble cast of actors piloting AI diffusion characters (or whatever future techniques emerge) will make a film as well acted as Glengarry Glen Ross. Perhaps even set in some fantasy or sci-fi landscape. I bet that we'll have a thousand Zach Hadels, Vivienne Medranos, and Joel Havers finding massive audiences with their small footprint studios, making anime, cartoons, lifelike fantasy, lifelike science fiction, period dramas, and more. And that AI tools will be the linchpin of this creative explosion.
If that happens in the next 10 years and we judge "as good as starwars" using my above criteria. You would win the bet.
> we judge "as good as starwars" using my above criteria.
Just to clarify, this would be an AI film or "tv show" winning at traditional awards: Emmys (The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences), SAG Awards, Oscars (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences), etc. Or traditional film festivals such as Sundance and Cannes, eg. winning the Palme d'Or. I would even be happy setting a threshold whereby a film or long-format show must win more than one award from several such institutions.
Maybe a preponderance of praise (20 or more) from major film and media critics like Roger Ebert (RIP), Leonard Maltin, Richard Brody, et al. could also be a criteria that must be met. Though perhaps that's a necessary condition anyway.
Yup, with the small caveat that the category for the award isn't something silly like "best use of AI in a film". I'm fine if it's like best VFX or whatever, but I'd have a hard time if the awards committee created a new category specifically to give awards for AI.
Someone needs to say “play me new episodes of the office or arrested development” and it needs to generate something that resembles the office or arrested development. People can have the noise on in the background, and it won’t matter if it isn’t quite coherent or super funny.
Yeah, even I, who is pretty bullish on AI in general, agree in doubting the premise that AI is going to make movies that are so good that people stop having any interest in older movies.
I think it's more likely that once Gen Z is the oldest surviving generation, maybe no one will watch any content longer than a TikTok due to attention span degradation and Hollywood just churns out vertical 2 minute videos direct to phones rather than release movies, and those would be some mixture of AI and human-created work.
I’m not sure compelling & bountiful AI films and interest in older films are mutually exclusive.
A flood of high quality AI content might devalue it as it becomes too normal, familiar or expected. In a strange way, this might reinvigorate interest in back catalogs.
Also, some content is truly timeless regardless of its production quality. Our kids have the world’s content at their disposal and their favorite is currently Tom & Jerry episodes from the 1960s. Go figure.
I don't agree with that argument. I am constantly finding new movies and TV shows to watch that I genuinely enjoy, but I still (reasonably often, even) watch or re-watch older content that I end up enjoying just as much.
Flooding the market with AI-generated content -- even if that content is good -- is not going to stop me from watching (or re-watching) older human-created productions.
I don't think I'm all that unique. I don't watch broadcast/cable television anymore, but I know people (especially those less technologically sophisticated, of any ages) who still flip through the on-screen TV guide, and are happy to tune in to watch a 1980s movie on some random channel, ads and all.
I agree with that, although for me it's books that I really enjoy currently.
After quitting most of social media, the jump-cutting in a lot of shows and movies nowadays gives me headaches weirdly... maybe that's just me though.
Also, everyone that's at least a teenager has grown up on human produced content - most of this worry will only manifest if there's a generation that strictly prefers AI produced content instead of it just being a complement (e.g. the generated pictures in articles, or automatic clips from Twitch streams)
"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.
The back catalogue will have a few scattered gems that you can find amongst the sea of mass media that appealed to its audience at the time. Most of that content no longer relates or makes sense to us. There's also a massive load of dreck and garbage.
People should be realistic about this instead of emotionally invested against AI as the news media has tried to sway this. It's just a tool, and artists are starting to use it productively.
It seems most of the things Netflix produces is optimized by the algo for attention. When I feel it directing me gives me the ick. Looking at you Squid Game.
It's part of the same phenomenon we see in social media. The first waves of social media and YouTube were predicated on the idea that you either seek out content yourself or view a feed of content you'd already taken action to subscribe to/follow. Services like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube pivoted to go from "pull" where users select content or stay within their own networks, to a "push" model where the algorithm predicts and autoplays content, mostly from strangers, based on highly accurate predictions of virality and eyeball-retaining potential.
Things like Netflix realized it too and buried the "Continue Watching" at a randomized index in an endless carousel, added Autoplay and even starts autoplaying something different after you finish a series. And of course, newer things like TikTok have always been this way. All these things are, I'd argue, user-hostile in that they're optimizing toward, in the extreme case, complete addiction.
No need to suspect, they are advertising that openly and are proud of it. Famously, years ago they invented House of Cards TV show by looking at the most popular search tags and picked the most popular ones to select a genre and theme of a new show. It was a story of many articles about Netlix back then.
No, that's not at all what happened. House of Cards was a highly regarded UK TV series from BBC (made in the early 1990s). Like many UK TV series, it was ripe for an American adaptation. Netflix won the bidding war for that adaptation.
Making up "famous" examples doesn't make your case stronger, but the opposite.
> Famously, years ago they invented House of Cards TV show by looking at the most popular search tags and picked the most popular ones to select a genre and theme of a new show
This does not appear to be true based on any articles I can find. I do believe they heavily follow the trends from their analytics in what the shows they buy and what they cancel, though.
Yeah, just like how the Odyssey became worthless when people started writing things down, the bible fell into obsolescence with the printing press, and Ulysses was usurped by the internet.
It's super early, and a lot of artists have issues with controllability that make the tools hard to incorporate. This is quickly changing.
Here's a really small scoped short film made with the limited tools available half a year ago. It accomplished simple storytelling with limited tooling:
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.
> Films are going to look more like fanfiction.net, Bandcamp, ArtStation, and Steam. That's a good thing.
It is already starting too. Click on some random 'read a sci-fi story' and your YT feed will be full of AI pictures with moderate coherency (depending on what AI tools they are using). Sometimes it will be very short videos with moderate in scene and poor inter scene coherency. It was utterly garbage a year ago with most of them sticking to static pictures. Voice clone is like 98% there and hard to tell at this point. If you listen to the story structure you can tell an AI probably wrote the story too.
There are services out there were you can say 'write me the lyrics to a metal song about ducks and chickens' and then take that paste it into another service and say 'make a metal song with these lyrics' then paste the results into another service and put an AI voice of darth vader over it using the lyrics. That this is coming to video is not that big of a leap. That has gone from random limbs popping out of peoples foreheads to weird little janky things.
I can today just use chatgpt and say 'write me a SCP memo on a man eating couch that stalks elephants of keter class' It will. I can add some small details and it will be an acceptable waste of my time. Written form is today being consumed quickly by the likes of chatgpt. The other types are next in line.
People are already doing this. It is all over YT and tiktok.
In the same way AI will replace bland techno and run of the mill lofi hop hop, it’ll do the same for all the cgi crap Dreamworks puts out twice a year.
AI can copy things that are already copied, but you’ll never get something as paradigm shifting as Toy Story 1.
Yeah I can't wait for "Forest Gump 2", The Simpsons Live Action starring John C. Reilly as Barney, and "Lord of the Rings But It's A Wes Anderson Movie". AI distilling the absolutely worst and most cynical Hollywood trends into full length motion pictures. I've yet to see anything remotely approaching non-slop from AI-generated video.
This already happens without AI, it's just that studios can only produce so many films given the budget, labor, and time constraints.
Tell me that any of the "Jurassic Park" films beyond the first were necessary. Or the "Lord of the Rings" films and shows beyond the original trilogy. These are products of the classical studio system. They keep trying to remake "Back to the Future" and as soon as Zemeckis dies, they'll have their way.
There will be amazing art made using AI, and AI will enable extremely talented creators that could have never made it in the classical studio system.
Don't be so pessimistic.
We're going to have "Obra Dinn" and "Undertale" equivalents in film soon. Small scale auteurs sharing their mind's eye with you.
Seems like we should have seen these groundbreaking creative works that have been totally inaccessible to create without AI by now rather than a million "X as a Wes Anderson Movie" trailers. Filmmaking has not been an inaccessible creative endeavor since like the 1910s. Budget price cameras have been with us for a long time. It's a weird AI company invention to suggest there are people who've been shut out of this pursuit for some reason. Creators don't need to wait around for AI to generate slop out of prompts, they can make movies.
The technology has to exist first. The technology is first picked up by early adopters: hustlers, marketers, hypsters. Not by practicing professionals.
It takes time for the new tools to work their way into the creative field. It first gets pushback, then it happens a little, and then all at once.
We're still super early days into this tech. Give it more time and it'll be all-capable and everywhere.
The canary in the coal mine is all the young people playing with it.
I suppose the point here is that although the tech may become ubiquitous, it can't make people creative. Previous young people had access to cheap digital video cameras, and the best they could do was Blair Witch. The bottleneck when it comes to good movies is not the technology, it's creatives being any good. There's not a bottled-up reservoir of creative juice waiting to surge forth as soon as friction is reduced, any more than in previous decades.
Which, to be fair ... considering the past, we always have one or two notable indie films inspired by access to tech, so we'll probably see one or two more in years to come, amid a sea of slop.
Don't let the cloud providers fool you. Bandwidth is cheap, especially for Googles, Netflixes and Cloudflares of the world which peer with every ISP that matters.
Cloudflare wishes it peered with everyone and steers its own astroturfing pressure groups hoping to achieve that. The economics are similar though; their major product remains DDoS sinking, so driving down the marginal cost of traffic is Cloudflare’s strategy. The difference is that the content they mediate is thereby an incentive towards peering and not the core business proposition.
Yeah and that is their point. And it's actually highly problematic just how much discount the large giants get on traffic - it effectively blocks any competitors not backed by some very deep pockets.
Google owns a large percentage of the backbone and does not pay for traffic. It owns not just its own fiber, but also leases dark fiber and right of way.
Google has been buying railroad for access to right of way to lay fiber since the early 2000s. Peering agreements using their networks give them transit for free on other networks.
Bandwidth is a part, but that’s an easy hurdle. But running a CDN at that scale is gonna require experience and truck load of money. The juice really has to be worth the squeeze.
That's why companies doing streaming at less than Google's scale can pay Aakami or a company like them to do that, caching copies at datacenters around the world close to the people doing the watching.
> But running a CDN at that scale is gonna require experience and truck load of money
Take Netflix for example. Their CDN at scale is pretty good for VOD type of delivery, but they continue to get it wrong for live event streaming. Even Twit..er, X falls down with their large event live streaming.
Adding the "live" component makes everything just that much harder
Live streaming with HLS is equal to distributing static files and can be very low latency.
If you need to go below 3s of latency, yes it becomes harder, but everything else is thankfully solved.
The bigger issue with live streaming are the peaks: 0 views in one second and millions in the next. Even with static content delivery that leads to all kinds of issues.
> they continue to get it wrong for live event streaming
And truly live (which means probably under 10 seconds from lens to viewer - i.e. the time it takes for the "X win" notification to pop up on your phone) is even harder than traditional "live" in the 40-60 second window.
Ideally you want all viewer to view it at the same time (so when next-door are cheering on a feed 3 seconds ahead of you it's not spoilt).
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!
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...
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.
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.
I agree with parent that the bigger issue is distribution. Installing random apps sucks. YouTube has distribution. If they can make more money off esoteric movies by using YouTube then that makes more sense than having an extremely long tail of content in your app that probably no one will discover.
Google laid fiber cables across the ocean, they already own the whole infrastructure and rent it out. It's a cost only in the sense that they potentially can't sell as much capacity as without their own traffic going down the pipes.
Biggest cost is generating an ad platform that can get enough data to serve relevant ads to people increasing the effectiveness of the ads. You can't beat googles ad platform in terms of data and targeting.
If they just wanted to throw this stuff out there at minimal bandwidth costs, a page of .torrent files and a seedbox would get it done for pennies.
"Streaming", who gives a hoot, just download it like everything else. "Service" can take a hike, video player software already exists and all the UI work is done. That part is utterly superfluous.
"good" content that people want to watch is by far the biggest cost. you can find content for pennies on the dollar, but your viewers will not make it worth the expense as no advertisers will want to spend money with your low viewer count
Actually it seems like region-specific copyright deals are still very much in play. If I visit that playlist from Australia then 14 of the full movies are unavailable and hidden. But VPN'ing through the US shows me the whole set.
Yes however, the original broadcast contracts may not have clauses in them for streaming services so having to revisit those contracts would be a costly process.
I'm pretty sure this is a feature that's available at least to big creators – I remember a Tom Scott video doing a bit involving scheduling an ad at a particularly fitting moment.
You might have to be a YouTube partner or something like that to make use of this stuff, though.
You need to be in the YouTube partner program, but that's not just available to big creators.
You need at least 1000 subscribers and a certain amount of video watch time per year to qualify, but even fairly small channels can meet this bar. When people talk about getting monetized on YouTube, this is what they mean.
Yeah, YouTube's UI lets you set where the ads go. The creator tools let you set how many, and where midroll ads will play. However, most creators just click the "insert automatically" button.
> However, most creators just click the "insert automatically" button.
That seems like a good opportunity for a neural net feature that's smarter than simple scene cut detection. While most theatrical films lack many good spots for commercial breaks, there are certainly a lot of "less bad" spots. Sadly, I doubt YT will bother since they no longer seem to care about viewer experience in recent years.
Would ABC make more if everyone switched to premium, or if everyone was ad-suppported? Be thorough, include ad sales people, telephone lines, lawyers, etc.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But it also takes very little effort or cost... It's effectively free money at their scale.. no bandwidth fees, no storage, no user membership, etc... it's hard to sell a pile of junk no one wants to watch in a subscription too -- okay that might be harsh, but a LOT of old stuff is do do hard to watch nowadays... So there's certainly some great classics.. but also a lot of stuff that most people would never watch outside a class assignment
My cousin worked at a major network porting programs for rebroadcast (they did some minor updates). They got surprised when a few shows they posted on YouTube got some traction (they became news worthy), getting a decent numbers of views and a check appeared..
I'm not so sure Paramount are doing it anymore, though. The link in that article leads to Paramount Scares which just has some clips and some rent-or-buy movies.
I’d like to note that older movies have often been “live streamed” in an ad-supported format for many decades.
You were even able to use your own equipment to “download” these movies to local “storage” and keep a collection with enough determination. The resolution was often terrible, somewhere around 240i and 360i.
I was referring to VHS recording which is limited to less-than-broadcast resolutions.
DVD and HDD PVRs for analog broadcasts did capture at 480i but were wildly expensive.
Subchannels are an interesting concept, but suffer from compression loss from packing in multiple streams into a single 6 MHz slice that would otherwise be a single channel.
Don’t get me started on the fact that we are limited at 1080i as well.
> Anyway, Waiting for Guffman still holds up, and you can watch it on YouTube, for free.
On top of that it never was released outside of the US before! As a European fan of Spinal Tap I'm quite excited to finally be able to see this film.
Also: no mention of The Mission, which is also in the list? That's quite a critically acclaimed one. Just look at these opening paragraphs from its wikipedia page:
> The Mission is a 1986 British historical drama film about the experiences of a Jesuit missionary in 18th-century South America.[4] Directed by Roland Joffé and written by Robert Bolt, the film stars Robert De Niro, Jeremy Irons, Ray McAnally, Aidan Quinn, Cherie Lunghi, and Liam Neeson.
> The film premiered in competition at the 39th Cannes Film Festival, winning the Palme d'Or. At the 59th Academy Awards it was nominated for seven awards including Best Picture and Best Director, winning for Best Cinematography. The film has also been cited as one of the greatest religious films of all time, appearing in the Vatican film list's "Religion" section and being number one on the Church Times' Top 50 Religious Films list.
Oh, and the score is by a certain Ennio Morricone.
I discovered the Mission through an Ennio Morricone playlist, and didn't regret it.
Not a religious person but it made me aware of who the Jesuits were and read up on them. Truly a fascinating part of the Catholic Church, they're like crack Navy Seals in religious terms, or 10x engineers of the Vatican :)
I sometimes program whilst listening to "Gabriel's Oboe" on repeat for hours and hours
What is the similarity between the Dominicans and the Jesuits?
Both were started to fight heresy: the Dominicans the Cathars, the Jesuits the Protestants. Both were started by soldiers. Both have unique spiritual disciplines.
Luther also showed up just as the HRE's centralization was beginning to show major major cracks. Luther wasn't the first "heretic" to challenge the catholic church, but he was the first one with major political support (a duke or a prince, I can't recall which).
There's also the Moravians and Lolards. Everyone knew Catholicism needed to change but it wasn't until the Reformation the pressure existed for the Counter-reformation to overcome the obstacles within the Catholic church.
> As a European fan of Spinal Tap I'm quite excited to finally be able to see this film.
You're in for a treat. While somewhat similar, Waiting for Guffman is a bit different than Spinal Tap. It has layers to the satire that are even more subtle. Not as many call back lines destined to live in memes forever (eg "It goes to eleven"). It's more of a character study that's willing to simply bask in the absolute vacuum of unself-awareness long enough to let it wrap back on itself and evolve into sincere charm. Eugene Levy is a treat as always and Fred Willard's performance evokes echoes of his legendary work on Fernwood Tonight.
Waiting For Guffman is perfect, up there in my Mount Rushmore of comedy films.
The true genius is that where it would be really easy to be mocking these small town people and their hokey play, the movie toes the line flawlessly of making sure the viewer isn’t really laughing AT them all that much. It’s also worth noting that the play itself at the end isn’t a disaster but actually a wonderfully produced show that the audience and town love.
I think Guest’s more recent films went a bit too far into the “mocking” part of the Mocumentary, but Guffman doesn’t.
Also worth mentioning Catherine O’Hara drunk in the Chinese restaurant might be one of the most realistic portrayals of being drunk I’ve seen in a movie.
This is wonderful news. My Waiting for Guffman dvd was lost at some point and I often open its case wanting to watch and remember again and get disappointed like Corky.
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.
Apple has a rental model like this as well, dating back to the iPod Video days. It still exists for the AppleTV.
For people who only watch a couple movies per month, this is cheaper, with more variety, than any streaming service. While also avoiding the trap of forgotten subscriptions that aren’t being used.
I had thought that, until recently I went to watch Spinal Tap with my son, and it's not apparently on Prime Video, even for pay. Which is odd, because I'm pretty sure I previously "bought" it there.
I don't like buying DRM-encumbered digital copies. I'm OK with streaming subscriptions because their catalogues are fundamentally ephemeral, but if I buy a movie I want to know I can keep it forever, even if the platform I bought it from disappears entirely.
To that end, I only buy physical media that can be copied and have its DRM removed. On the plus side, Blu-Ray turns 20 next year and still provides better image quality than your typical 1080p stream.
we're trying to cut back to only Disney+ for kids and we use prime video for us. Amazon's genius "take this prime video credit for slow shipping" has us renting movies maybe once a week and it's much better value for us than all subscriptions services that get no playtime.
I assume they get "monetization" from Youtube and they don't need to worry about hosting or discovery. Probably better than doing nothing with these films.
The only 2 companies that made money during the “streaming wars” were Netflix, which had the infrastructure in place already and didn’t need to build anything from scratch, and Sony, which decided not to build any streaming service and just license all its content out. Seems WBD is following the lead of a winner.
Is it really following the lead of a winner if you started by building your own failing streaming service, then buying another streaming service and merging them, and only then starting to license out content?
Warner Bros didn't buy out Discovery, other way around really. In return for taking on loads of debt, Discovery got ownership of WB.
HBO Max was an incredibly lean org, around 200-300 engineers at launch, 1/10th the size of its competitors but we launched a similar scaled service (tens of millions of domestic users, followed up by international launches one after another).
IMHO once COVID ended and HBO Max just became a streaming destination instead of having movies "launched" on it, they'd be just fine in terms of profit (and indeed iirc the successor Max service is profitable). First releasing big block busters doesn't drive enough user growth to pay for the movie, but if you have an existing content pipeline then having a streaming service as another delivery platform becomes reasonable.
Agreed on all counts, Discovery is the company I was referring to and Discovery+ was the 'failing' platform, not HBO Max. Though to be fair my recollection was hazy and the story around Discovery+ is not that simple given that it has stuck around post merge and is profitable according to Zaslav. I don't really trust his definition of profitable given his general love for accounting fuckery but the fact that its running is something.
As an aside, props to the team. It's been a while but I remember being pleasantly surprised after getting shuffled over from HBO GO. It's even more impressive to know it was such a small team compared to other services.
Max has gone to crap since the merger though. They cancelled a lot of the quality content and added a bunch of cheap and awful crap like reality shows to the service. It's like someone bought a Rolls Royce and riced it out.
It was ATT that fired all the old HBO bosses that curated for quality. They just dumped their failed experiment onto Discovery to squeeze out whatever was left.
Much like Spotify; it took them many, many years to achieve only a 7% profit margin. Meanwhile, UMG runs at 16%.
The only company that actually makes good money from being a content middleman is, somehow, YouTube. I don't know how they do it. YouTube is among the greatest businesses in human history.
Because YouTube has found a way to monetize the work of it's content creators. Online influencers are incentivized to make videos to get paid and YouTube has reduced their costs enough to make it worthwhile.
In addition to that, whenever users are just starting out, their videos still get ad rolls but the creator doesn't get any money. That's millions of new videos every day that Youtube can monetize until those creators are eligible to collect the checks for themself (if ever).
Also, YouTube does aggressive caching of very old videos that have very few views. You might need to wait 10 seconds for YT to fetch the video from cold storage before watching, but in the grand scheme of things, it's worth it to them.
I'm a little surprised there isn't more of this. Building a streaming service is pretty expensive.. a lot of the platforms lost money doing so and really only made it back when they merged into an umbrella of other services.
I'm also a little surprised no one has yet (AFAIK) done the "viral indie release to Youtube" path. I feel like it's sitting there waiting to be exploited.
"I'm also a little surprised no one has yet (AFAIK) done the "viral indie release to Youtube" path. I feel like it's sitting there waiting to be exploited."
There's a lot of "indies releasing things to YouTube directly". However, they're limited both by the algorithm and by the amount of money they can generate by that, so you get a fairly restricted set of genres that this can work with, like sketch comedy or (perhaps a bit surprisingly to me) science documentaries, like Veritasium or Practical Engineering.
These are basically indie filmmakers doing a very indie thing that doesn't fit anywhere else.
Movies are, after all, as affected by their release technology as anything else. There's a reason they're all 80-130 minutes, and they have their own genre restrictions as a result of it, especially if you think of it in terms not just of binary possibility but how popular things are. It isn't reasonable to expect a very different distribution method to result in "movies" you'd recognize from the cinema any more than it is reasonable to expect that television would only ever have run "movies" and never developed its own genres that don't work in cinema. Taking into account the need for the content to match its distribution there's a ton of indie stuff on YouTube. What I would say you are really seeing is the restrictiveness of "The Algorithm", and that is an interesting question to ponder on its own.
In a similar vein, I remember reading somewhere that creating shows for direct-to-streaming is liberating because, although it is quite similar to TV in that it's telling a story in chunks (usually 30 to 60 minutes) without a guarantee of continuation (renewal), you don't have the primary constraints of traditional television: fitting into a specific time slot, saving time for commercials, and creating hooks that lead neatly into each ad break to get the audience to stick around.
You see this often with Apple TV+ shows. Some episodes are only 40~ minutes while the very next one might be 70. They can scope the episode to only include the content that is required for that story and extend the runtime when they need to include extra details or scenes to make everything flow nicely.
For most viewers, the discretion is worthwhile for better storytelling.
Part of this is that YouTube makes this viable only for creators whose inbound viewers are likely to stay to watch a majority of the content; otherwise, the algorithm penalizes your content for every "bounce." A comedy short that'll attract people who like comedy shorts, and will be over before many people bounce? A long-form science documentary that's likely only going to be clicked by someone who wants to watch a long-form science documentary? Both meet this criterion. But any kind of traditional filmmaking with longer character arcs will be penalized, and that's a really hard thing to see for your creation's primary distribution channel.
Vimeo has tried to prioritize indie feature discovery from what I can tell. Not sure what its ownership or business is. Also not sure how it compares to (in music) soundcloud's or bandcamp's approaches.
Rooster Teeth (of "Red vs Blue" and "RWBY" fame) did the "indie filmmaker on youtube" thing pretty successfully. Eventually they moved to their own site, then fell apart after a lot of drama and internal differences.
Also vaguely guestures at all of youtube. Most youtube creators are independent, and a lot of them have higher production value than indie movies. You just don't recognize them because of how the algorithm and monetization favor regular installments of ~10 minute episodes, causing most content to take that form. A documentary simply works better on youtube as a Tom Scott video than as a 45 minute piece (though there are plenty of those too)
Movie rights will be a big factor also. Events like TIFF, Cannes etc, while being a platform to show films is also where deals are done, distribution rights are signed always for different territories etc.
YouTube is essentially international which may invalidate some pre-existing licence and distribution agreements.
Youtube has the ability to limit videos to certain markets. One example is that the entirety of Mythbusters was uploaded in the past couple years, but isn't available to view in the US.
I have a list of movies you can't find anywhere, not even for pay, not even on on obscure services. I check every once in a while to see if they pop up (JustWatch.us is great for this, IMDB is copying). Example: "Amateur" by Hal Hartley, though it's easy enough to buy copies on DVD.
The problem is once the rights for a title end up in a library, the accessibility considerations operate at the library level, not the title level. So if some company owns the rights to "n" titles en masse, they're negotiating for the distribution rights to that library.
You can't really pull a Taylor Swift or Def Leppard "re-record for rights" move with movies.
UPDATE: Happy to be wrong about my cited example.. Thanks @andsoitis !
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browningstreet 43 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–]
I have a list of movies you can't find anywhere, not even for pay, not even on on obscure services. I check every once in a while to see if they pop up (JustWatch.us is great for this, IMDB is copying). Example: "Amateur" by Hal Hartley, though it's easy enough to buy copies on DVD.
At a finer grain than general "permission", a lot of the issue is with the music. For many pre-streaming movies, the original soundtrack will have been licensed in a way that supported resale but didn't foresee streaming. Making those movies available for streaming would involve tracking down the copyright holders for every piece of music (often the estates or successors of the original composer, but often non-determinate) and renegotiating a licensing deal.
Yeah there are just a lot of titles with weird rights situations that no one cares about resolving. Maybe you lost clearance on a song in the movie, or one of the actors has a clause in their contract, or some company bought the distribution rights for a certain territory and then went out of business.
Lots of situations where resolving the rights issues is going to cost more than you expect the movie to bring in, especially once you start talking about splitting the revenue with online storefronts.
As someone who has built a streaming service, I’m always amazed how much money the studios throw at it and don’t have something good or profitable. The infra cost for my service was then 10% of revenue. I just wish the huge consolidation hadn’t happened, now all of the studios are too protective of their content.
If anyone has ideas for re-purposing or re-targeting a streaming service, I’m all ears.
Go for international movies. A lot of them have incredibly convoluted rights, so the biggest expense is going to be negociations, but if you can become a destination to find obscure films from varied countries, it might be possible to eke out a slice of the pie.
I would argue KanePixels (Kane Parsons) is doing the Indie filmmaker thing very successfully on YouTube. He went from creating a viral hit with his interpretation of The Backrooms, signed a deal with A24, and has continued releasing his own horror short films in the interim. The format isn't the standard 90-120 minutes of most studio movies but his longest videos are nearly an hour long and with each narrative spread across several videos, stitching the whole thing together would look something like a conventional film
Movies are capital intensive, a movie is less likely to go viral than a video that is made to be viral. Thus, doing this is risky. Also, people wanting to create viral movies probably do not want to make viral videos.
These old movies have already made their money. Anything they can get now is just gravy.
It’s a Wonderful Life is popular because the copyright expired and TV stations could play it for free. Playing it so much got people to watch, and now it’s a classic. It bombed originally.
Putting old movies on YouTube gives them a chance at a second life, and the studio doing it, means they can still earn some money on something that would otherwise just sit in a vault somewhere.
I've seen a few things go that route - Hazbin Hotel was a YouTube pilot ish thing and got picked up on Amazon, I think amazing digital circus got grabbed by someone too.
No one seems to stay on YouTube when it happens though.
I think you missed a decade or two. This was already a thing and the mainstream didn't exactly have the appetite for it. Check out 'web series' on Wikipedia.
I don't know what you're into but "The Guild" is pretty excellent example of the form.
Could you please expand on your "viral indie release to Youtube" idea? I am just a YT basic user and don't know what is there and what is not beyond HN, random videos, and my relatively simple use cases (e.g. music videos, and movie trailers).
The best example I can think of is already mentioned up-thread, but just to drill down on that. Kung Fury[1] was initially released on Youtube (and a few other services, mostly in other countries I think) and became a pretty big viral hit. Enough so that the filmmaker eventually signed a deal to make a sequel[2] with distribution by a traditional film company and some big-name stars. Unfortunately the release of the sequel has been held up for "legal reasons" and FSM only knows when or if it will see the light of day. :-(
Anyway, not as big as BWP, but still a decent example of the concept under discussion, I think.
Just because the quality of the things people upload there isn't up to the arbitrary standards of "as good as the Blair Witch Project" doesn't mean its less valuable
I get that the real issue isn't just YouTube, but that no other horror film, or otherwise, has really matched Blair Witch Project's combination of impact, marketing success, micro-budget, and cultural phenomenon.
I just speculate that if Blair Witch Project were made today, it would likely debut on a platform like YouTube before gaining wider recognition.
> Building a streaming service is pretty expensive..
It's not. At least not for companies of that size. There is PeerTube for that: https://joinpeertube.org/. It can even decrease the load to your servers by spreading the trafic over peers.
Which problems are you expecting if you already have the content, the servers and the software? It's a famous company; people would definitely watch their movies for a small payment or with ads.
If it's like a regular YT video and monetized as such, there's going to be regular ad breaks... which effectively makes it just like watching a film on cable TV, and I suspect the amount they would earn is similar. Although iirc a cable channel would pay a fixed amount for the syndication rights, then their profit would be from ads in turn, in this case the profits would go straight to the publisher after Youtube takes its cut.
as a 2nd order effect, crowds out the competition: every 90 minutes spent watching a low value film of yours is time not spent watching anything of the competition.
It's also the same channel they put their new trailers on, so the increased watch time should really help with getting their other videos recommended more.
The 11th Hour (2007, Documentary, 7.2)
The Wind and the Lion (1975, Adventure Epic, 6.8)
Mr. Nice Guy (1997, Martial Arts Dark Comedy, 6.2)
City Heat (1984, Buddy Cop, 5.5)
Michael Collins (1996, Docudrama, 7.1)
The Adventures Of Pluto Nash (2002, Space Sci-Fi Comedy, 3.9)
Chaos Theory (2007, Comedy Drama Romance, 6.6)
Mutiny on the Bounty (1962, Historical Globetrotting Adventure, 7.2)
Dungeons & Dragons (2000, Adventure Fantasy, 3.7)
Return Of The Living Dead Part II (1988, Zombie Horror Comedy, 5.7)
The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990, Dark Comedy, 5.6)
The Accidental Tourist (1988, Comedy Drama Romance, 6.7)
Critters 4 (1992, Horror Sci-Fi, 4.1)
Murder in the First (1995, Legal Thriller, 7.3)
The Year of Living Dangerously (1982, Drama Romance War, 7.1)
December Boys (2007, Drama Romance, 6.5)
Waiting for Guffman (1996, Satire, 7.4)
Lionheart (1987, Adventure Drama, 5.1)
Oh, God! (1977, Comedy Fantasy, 6.6)
Crossing Delancey (1988, Comedy Romance, 6.9)
Price of Glory (2000, Drama Sport, 6.1)
Flight of the Living Dead (2007, Horror, 5.1)
Deal of the Century (1983, Dark Comedy Satire Crime, 4.6)
Deathtrap (1982, Dark Comedy Suspense Mystery, 7.0)
The Mission (1986, Historical Epic Jungle Adventure, 7.4)
SubUrbia (1996, Comedy Drama, 6.7)
Hot To Trot (1988, Comedy Fantasy, 4.5)
True Stories (1986, Comedy Musical, 7.2)
The Science of Sleep (2006, Quirky Comedy Drama Romance, 7.2)
The Big Tease (1999, Comedy, 6.1)
Out of that list, The Science of Sleep stands out to me. It is a film by Michel Gondry who also directed Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It is kind of an indie pretentious movie, but if you are into that kind of thing it is a decent one.
Yeah I was going to say the III one is surprisingly good. I used to know the director and he was super cool. Also produced re-animator. He also did a weird low budget movie called "society" which is interesting.
There are a few horror and sci fi movies with similar themes to Society that all came out around the same time. Society is probably the wildest. Worth a watch.
Anything from before the 1980s should just be on YouTube, its easy cash for them on films that are sitting idle otherwise. Anything they aren't licensing to anyone anywhere should just be on YouTube. Or any sort of streaming platform that has sane ads, and anyone can see. It is really sad to me there's no genuine YouTube competitor.
> Anything from before the 1980s should just be on YouTube
Agreed, but because all of that should be public domain at this point. The idea that
some company needs rent-seeking motivation to allow people to view 50-year old media literally until everyone who could have consumed it when it was published is dead is absurd.
It's such a scandal that even though the original Mickey Mouse cartoons are finally in the public domain, the Mickey Mouse Protection Act is still preventing anything created in our lifetimes from ever joining the public domain during them.
I wanted to say that too, but I rather take any wins we can get. I mean, the best part is, if they made their movies public domain THEN put them all on youtube, they would earn so much ad revenue from them being on their YouTube accounts.
"you should just do X" generally means you don't have the full picture. You're completely disregarding all the union stuff that needs to be considered. You're forgetting all the little guys that make movies happen. Yeah the directors and actors probably don't care, but the other 100s of other people involved in making films probably do.
Edit: You're right. Just disregard any laws and contracts in place. HN knows best. It must be that easy.
Are the little guys receiving royalties from these movies decades later? I recall instances where actors paid some of the little guys out of their own pocket to keep movies going, Deadpool is an example of this.
> You're forgetting all the little guys that make movies happen. Yeah the directors and actors probably don't care, but the other 100s of other people involved in making films probably do.
We're talking about movies that are 45 years old at a minimum. The majority of the people "involved in making the film" are dead at this point.
They found me. I found public domain old black and white military training videos on a public resource on the internet and put them in YouTube. Then they did the YouTube strike thing and I called them and the guy was a total jerk on the phone. Like Jerry McGuire or that other guy Tom Cruise played in Tropic Thunder.
I was putting them up in good faith as a public service.
Yes, they did. But when I pointed out that they didn't in fact own the copyright they highlighted this detail about the youtube terms if service, so I still had to take the video down, not because it violated copyright, but because it violated the YouTube terms of service.
Youtube enforces its own terms of service, not them. They just bullied you into removing the content so they can keep their ad revenue from the views without having to compete with you.
It’s Zaslav-era WB so there’s probably some kind of weird tqx write-off happening, or some contractual agreement that they’re living up to in the cheapest way possible.
Some good stuff on there - shout out to The Mission, which includes one of Morricone’s greatest scores.
This is a good point. They may lose rights if they fail to distribute for a certain amount of time. They may revert to the filmmaker or someone else. This is a way to comply contractually.
My first thought upon reading the headline was that it's better that they put everything on YouTube, than delete more stuff like what they did to Cartoon Network's website:
"In an interview in 2011, Bobcat Goldthwait said that he got the script for Hot to Trot and wrote "Why would I do this?" on the cover, to which his manager responded by writing a dollar sign"
As someone with more modest means, I'm wondering - was that just a quip, or is it really possible for rich people to buy property first, and then figure out how to pay for it? How do they finance it?
For the type of rich people like actors, sports stars, etc, yes.
You may have an actor of a certain budget who has no roles lined up currently, but is a pretty safe bet he will get some lined up eventually, and so he's a decent risk for a loan.
This is private lending and is a completely different world than a home loan that is resold. Depending on the dollar amount, the lender will have their own appraisers, etc taking careful look at the collateral (which might be the castle you're buying, or that and more, or something else entirely, like royalties due, etc).
They will then structure it so that it's a heads they win, tails they don't lose - only lending as much as they're sure they'll be able to get back out (up to and including having alternate buyers lined up to purchase the property if it gets foreclosed, etc).
It depends on levels of money. At musk levels, it's cheaper to borrow from your shares on margin, spend that, and never repay anything but interest - no financing involved except lending out your own assets. At multi-million illiquid, you're going to go to a bank, show them accounts and historic income, and because you're an actor with bursty income, they'll smooth out the line and decide if the loan you want is above it or below it. He likely had the means for the down payment and the assets for enough monthlies that the bank felt it was de-risked, but you can also do hard-money loans and similar if you have expectations of payment - but they tend to come with heavy duty strings.
Which is to say - for musks, not like you or I, for the illiquid, very much the same process, but with money managers and the like doing the actual bank negotiation.
The same way most people do, with a mortgage. The difference is what a bank is willing to lend you if they see you have a significantly higher than average income.
It's also possible he wasn't just talking about the purchase payment. Large, old, valuable buildings also often require very large upkeep bills.
It has the best performance I've ever seen by Kevin Bacon, and a solid performance from Christian Slater. Gary Oldman is a solid villian. R. L. Emery does his usual thing, but he's really good at that usual thing. I think about lines and ideas from it frequently. Granted, this is partly because the movie came out when I was 15 and I watched it a formative age with friends. But I've also watched it recently, and I think it holds up.
They're not being dumped. Putting them on YT lets WB make passive money while maintaining control of their rights with little effort on their part. If WB makes a better deal down the road, they can hide or delete the movies from YT.
This also makes some of the movies more valuable by revealing hidden demand. WB will see their YT stats for their films and see where future investments or licensing deals may pay off. A streaming company is disincentivized to tell the movie owner how the film is doing.
Sony has this thing they call Bravia Core (which they no renamed to Sony Pictures Core) and as far as I can tell, it’s restricted to Bravia TVs (okay also PlayStations and an Xperia phone apparently). You get a certain number of credits when you buy a tv I guess. And then I don’t think you can even buy more. I get that it’s Sony trying to monetize their content in a way (though I’m not sure it really incentivizes the TV purchase if people don’t really know about it…) but it seems like a step in the wrong direction if other studios are looking to make their catalogs more accessible. The killer feature for the Sony service though is that it’s super high bandwidth and really high quality stream. (But, in testing it, it seems some of their tv processor hardware or memory limits can’t handle the load).
It’s like the most bizarre version of a walled garden.
At least using YouTube kind of makes it accessible to more people. And YouTube does have some high bitrate options
These are movies nobody is lining up to syndicate, for a company desperate for cash. Why not dump them on YouTube and get a bit of ad revenue? It’s low effort relative to the income it generates. Even if it’s unlikely to make much money.
I thought that at first, but if you look at the movies its hard to say any have much prestige? And you could probably make the case that getting more eyeballs on it will, if anything, make them a bit more valuable in 10 years. I still remember watching the same shitty movies on cable over and over as a kid just because they were available, and I imagine those movies have a higher place in the collective memory now because they were available.
The selection added has mostly reached end-of-life on cultural relevance and/or prestige. This is like reopening a tapped mine hoping for a few more nuggets of value. If anything gets too much traction they'll move it to a paid service.
I think prestige is hard to gauge from availability channels, and ebbs and flows. Sometimes visibility even increases interest and regard, if it's a sort of forgotten film.
Night of the Living Dead has been freely available for some time for example and is still considered a classic of horror. I'm not sure it hurt Criterion when they released a version of it. People are paying for the restoration and extras.
(It was a Roger Rabbit-style live action + cartoon character blend, based on an awesome newspaper parody, that was completely created, received rave reviews, and then shitcanned by the befuddling new accounting practices of Warner Bros. Discovery.)
I can't imagine any of these have potential. The Crossing Delancy cinematic universe isn't coming anytime soon. I think they just want some short term juice.
Bingo. YouTube has a massive audience and builtin social aspects. Something will eventually go viral from this and draw customer acquisition to the WB platform.
Many Indian movies are available on YouTube. Particularly old movies or dubbed from South Indian languages to Hindi. Some of them of 100s of millions of views. Considering home video market is more or less dead. YouTube is the best pay per view (via ads) available.
There is an increasing amount of UK TV uploaded to YouTube from whoever owns the rights. Have seen The Bill (26 seasons) and pretty much all of Gordon Ramsey's work recently (including a 8hr entire season video). ITV appears to have even created the brand "Our Stories" for their YouTube fly on the wall telly content.
Much of this not-fantastic-quality TV could probably be easily found on YouTube even without the rights holder being involved anyway - so better they get paid?
Channel 4's been doing it too, in fact absolutely loads of their shows are on YouTube now and they do it as a weekly release, so for example last week they posted the first episode of "Celebrity Hunted" season 6, and then a week later episode 2, etc.
> By releasing a handful of hidden gems next to some of the worst films it ever released, WBD is doing a disservice to its creative teams of past and present
Making older movies publicly available at no cost (albeit with ads) is good, actually?
Is the suggestion that there's no bad content on Max and that's why they should put the movies there, instead, behind a paywall? Instead of Youtube, he wants these movies next to Dr. Pimple Popper?
(Ironically, I'm pretty sure this is #1 on Hacker News because people appreciate the heads-up about the free resource, and not because folks support his call to remove them from public view.)
I watched one of these movies after reading this discussion on HN. It was blocked halfway thru the movie "not available in this region" (European IP address).
It would be great if they started putting the canceled and removed cartoons on YouTube as well. Stuff like Final Space, Close Enough, and Infinity Train, which AFAIK has no legal way of watching anymore, could get a new audience on YouTube.
The problem here (and problably the reason why they were removed from paid streaming services) are residuals [1]: Even if nobody watches them, studios still may have to pay actors, directors, writers, etc. a share. I assume the movies put on YouTube don't have any residual agreements.
Yeah, and I suspect also potential weirdness with tax law and writing off TV shows as a loss makes it hard to release again.
I actually do have legit copies of Infinity Train, I bought all four seasons on Amazon before the huge purge a couple years ago, but I would like legit copies of Close Enough.
I genuinely don't know what Warner Bros actually wants us to do? Is their official stance "it's ok to pirate it"?
I would say 1 million views should roughly pay the interns salary for a month. Some of the movies accumulated around a million views within the first 10 days.
Even though the article says this initiative is not part of YouTube Movies/Premium, assumedly if one does have YT Premium/Music, then these movies should be ad-free, correct?
They're ad-free for Premium subscribers, but some small amount of the premium subscription fee is supposed to be divvied up between everything you watch, so it is technically being monetized.
1. It puts these otherwise worthless movies to work and earns some ad revenue even if it is peanuts
2. There is always the chance a clip goes inexplicably viral on social and suddenly finds new relevance to the point that someone does want to pay money for it.
As always, don't count on it lasting. Nevertheless, it's a welcome move from WB, even if I've already fallen out of movie watching. I'm quite surprised they did it region-free.
I think this is a play on testing how the DRM of their catalog looks like. Looking through my mcn cms they have all the applicable claims on the content so they are possibly testing how many infringing videos are on YouTube as well as using all this content as a content funnel
I don’t know about officially sanctioned releases, but I feel like I’ve watched entire movies through YouTube shorts at this point… there’s a really simple grift that rockets to the top of the algorithm and also pushes people into a pipeline for other clips of the movie:
1. Clip a movie scene and crop it for vertical aspect ratio (maybe some AI is used here to choose the focus point of the scene)
2. Add royalty-free background music and possibly other tweaks like mirroring the video
3. Title it something generic that doesn’t acknowledge it’s a movie/show, like “College dropout beats Harvard Law grads to the job” for the scene from Suits (Note: for shorts, the title doesn’t matter if it’s algorithmically chosen to play next… in fact at this point the more relevant title is the optional link to a different short… the real title is barely visible)
4. Do not mention the name of the movie/show in the title or description
There are hundreds of accounts producing these shorts on an industrial scale. It’s easy to see how the automation works and also why it’s successful. It’s clickbait (people want to comment or ask for the title, or correct the title to mention it’s actually from a movie); it’s addicting (it funnels people into watching more clips from the same movie… funny how YouTube knows to do that but not that it’s copyrighted, btw); it’s self-optimizing (if the algorithm doesn’t surface the next short, people go looking for it specifically); and of course, it’s automatable (everything from curation to editing can be automated, and just a sprinkle of AI is apparently enough to obfuscate the automation).
What’s fascinating is that YouTube hasn’t stopped this. The shorts algorithm can obviously detect the similarity between clips from a movie, but the copyright/spam detection algorithm can’t detect the same.
Why not use some kind of interlacing and randomly sort the lines. The result is a valid video file which could be uploaded to YouTube. Then deinterlace with a browser plugin and the random pattern used to scramble the lines. Same can be applied to the audio.
Not sure I’m understanding you, but it sounds like you’re asking why not upload a video that’s scrambled until viewed with a browser plugin that knows how to unscramble it?
That would be cool, but it won’t be very effective as a viral video if everyone needs to have a browser plugin installed :)
The challenge here is to circumvent the copyright algorithms while still looking like a normal video to the user (who has no external tools installed).
However, for things like hosting pirated streams or sharing content out-of-band, it would be interesting. It’s basically the a minimally lossless form of steganography.
Youtube doesn't want to stop things like this. It is only when studios get furious and go after Alphabet that they'll finally move to do something about it.
Sure but it’d be kind of weird if they chose to launder it through all these spammy accounts instead of doing it above board. I guess it’s more effective this way though. They get more reach than they would from their single obviously branded account, and as the rightsholder they know they won’t get any (valid) DMCA complaints. And at the end of the day, Google has no reason to care and users are happy. Sure it’d be nice if the clips didn’t have annoying background music but that’s the tax we pay to algorithmic incentives…
Why? My guess is the data Youtube Analytics makes available and the potential for making something a cult classic.
To boot, if there’s no revenue, there’s no need to pay creative people. Indeed, if it boosts expenses under Hollywood accounting practices, those expenses might offset other income that would otherwise be owed to artists and their estates.
Since those are mostly old movies, my immediate thought was: "maybe it's a new creative way to create a new income stream for hard-to-sell-otherwise assets?". If a decent enough number of users watch them, it could bring some cash to the publisher, couldn't it?
That's my thinking too. In fact, I was in a mood to watch OG film noirs, but between 3 streaming services, the only movie available was Sunset Blvd. Also failed to find any of the 1950s sci-fi movies I went looking for.
people talking about ad revenue... It feels more like a reputational play, ie: throw some free movies out with the WBD logo, more people recognize the brand strength of WBD, then subscribe to Max. Though the selection is small and the movies don't look very good at a glance..
There just isn't much value in most old films. There are a handful of standouts per year, and anything in a major franchise, but the demand for everything else is low, so you might as well make it as easy to find as possible and get what money you can from it.
I imagine the selection seems random because these are films that WB has the most favorable contracts for -- So there is no need for them to track number of streams so they can send some director or production company penny checks every month, etc.
It's not strange that they are attempting to monetize movies that don't generate subscriptions or VOD revenue. WB/Discovery doesn't have a free streaming service like Tubi, PlutoTV, FreeVee, etc. so why not YouTube? The CPMs are great.
Mr. Nice Guy has 15M views so far. I don't know what that comes out to in ad revenue, but it seems like maybe this was a good idea. Most of the others don't have anywhere near this, though.
I've been using Youtube to re-discover a lot of fun movies from the 80s-00s that I never saw when I was a kid. It's quite nice to tune in and out while working.
They have these relatively obscure movies that aren't really worth much so why not throw them on youtube and give them the best possible chance of being watched.
I think it's a great move honestly, I know a tv show from the UK that's been doing the same, hopefully more shows/movies will do it as well.
because no one watches them, so better be available, and in peoples minds, grab attention (which is the #1 commodity in the world) than fall to obscurity
Now if only whoever owns the rights (Fox? Disney?) would follow suit and drop the old Fox TV catalog (Herman's Head. Whoops!, Parker Lewis Can't Lose) on youtube so I could rewatch the shows I loved as a kid, but never stream anywhere.
Have you tried finding a pirated copy anywhere? I went through an ordeal trying to find the original 60s batman show online for someone, since most available versions were the versions edited down to fit the increased number of ads in the 80s.
I am pretty sure what was syndicated and shown on TV here was the original 60s cut though, since we have far fewer ads than the US.
I think, for viewers, it's a win. Free movies, no DRM, and no region locks? But it's ironic that YouTube is now offering a more open and accessible archive than most official streaming services
Why are some great films mixed with some duds? This is classic Hollywood accounting. They sell N files for $M and then split the revenue evenly. The great film gets $M/N and so does every dud.
In practice, the great film's revenues have already "earned out" any advances so that $M/N must be shared with outsiders. Often, the duds haven't made enough so the studio gets to keep all $M/N.
I don't know that's what they're doing here. Certainly, they have enough data to accurately allocate revenues. But it's what's been done in the past.
The “Hollywood accounting” meme makes no sense. Anyone in the media production business can take 5 min to read the Wikipedia article on it (or use common sense) and learn that they should not accept compensation on terms completely controlled by the opposing party.
If they do, then they had no negotiating power in the first place, and so had nothing to lose by accepting those terms (because they were not going to get a better offer such as more cash upfront).
It's been ages since I've seen "Oh God" or "Hot to Trot". Not great movies, not genre or culture defining, but fine. These are movies I'd watch if they were on.
I hope they do more. And I hope other distributors follow suit. Basically, I want Critters 1-3.
I doubt they're deleting the master copies or the master renders or anything, so the only thing that would be offloaded would be the "consumer" renders. A Blu-ray movie with no additional compression added is between 15-40 gigs.
A consumer like me has a 300 terabyte storage array, presumably Warner Bros has even more than that (and certainly could afford more than that), so it feels like 40 gigs per movie is basically nothing.
All paid for, near zero cost to distribute, small crumbs of revenue, but from enough crumbs - a loaf can be made, and they have a lot of crumbs.
I have poked around and watched a few and I liked them. Good for you WB = adapt and prosper
Within the last 2 or 3 months, I have noticed that a lot of old movies are popping up on my YouTube feed. This includes full movies from the 30s to the 90s, and some are even in other languages. They are being uploaded, often with a small watermark in the corner, and they are not taken down.
I am rather curious as to why this is happening now (and happening across multiple countries, apparently) but I kinda like it.
They do no longer remember who holds the IP but have copies laying about. So post them, if they do not get a strike by a ip owner- they might be actual yours?
This is a desperation move. Warner, like many other studios fed Netflix the content to make the service that is destroying them. Then a WB had a disastrous acquisition by ATT-- admittedly made worse by a Trump grudge that held it up for years. Then an acquisition by Discovery, that added very little to WB except bad management. Destroying the HBO brand, DC, etc.
Why is this dumb? They get pennies for their assets today while they bolster the other tech giant that is going to kill them. Studios like WBD don't have the capital or the strategic vision to operate in this environment.
Good luck getting kids to watch them. Kids today have a hate on for movies or TV older than themselves. It makes sense since there has only been a handful of great movies in the last 20 years. Dumping B grade and lower stuff on YouTube is only going to reinforce the idea.
It’s hard to believe how far Hollywood has fallen. I haven’t paid much attention to trailers in years.
I will go ahead and say that some of these movies were given 'for free' some years ago. In some countries, Sunday newspapers and/or magazines would come with a 'free' DVD. But they were never giving away the blockbusters, they would give away good movies, with good cast (e.g. Mission - De Niro).
So there are so many (hundreds? thousands?) of DVDs/copies floating out there, to the point that nobody would pay a fee to watch them.
I had a collection of those 'free' DVDs that came in newspapers/magazines. Some years back I 'ripped' them all (kept photos of the album with the DVDs as proof of ownership) and threw away (responsibly) hundreds of DVD disks. I have never watched any of them.
I do not believe that all these "views" listed are real.. "True stories", 29k views in 6 days?? Really?? I think people search for "<title> full movie" and click on anything that comes up, as they search for some blockbuster/pirated movie.
And/or some people will click, use their InternetDownloadManager (or similar), download the 1080, save it, and never watch it.
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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