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

https://tedium.co/2025/02/05/warner-bros-youtube-full-movie-releases/

641 473 1 year ago

timmg• 1 year ago

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.

fsckboy• 1 year ago

agree.

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.

browningstreet5• 1 year ago

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.

wslh2• 1 year ago

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).

duxup2• 1 year ago

I'm surprised a lot of things aren't more accessible.

So much content not making money / available ANYWHERE.

I assume, that maybe the amount of difficulty in terms of getting permission is too high to bother so nobody does?

ANighRaisin• 1 year ago

There have been more niche shows that became quite popular after a YouTube release.

eptcyka2• 1 year ago

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.

dehugger• 1 year ago

Kung Fury would be my go-to example of "viral indie release".

illwrks3• 1 year ago

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.

fsflover2• 1 year ago

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.

jerf2• 1 year ago

"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.

korse• 1 year ago

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.

nemomarx• 1 year ago

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.

derektank• 1 year ago

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

https://m.imdb.com/name/nm10735410/

wongarsu• 1 year ago

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)

nabeards• 1 year ago

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.

al_borland3• 1 year ago

There is a price to pay for the control they’re trying to maintain. That price is called profit, in most cases.

bluedevil2k2• 1 year ago

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.

* https://www.yahoo.com/tech/sony-succeeded-becoming-powerful-...

enragedcacti2• 1 year ago

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?

guyzero• 1 year ago

Sony built Crackle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crackle_(service) but it's failed at this point.

jshen2• 1 year ago

Disney has been profitable lately.

Also odd to say that Netflix had the infrastructure already. They built it from scratch.

827a• 1 year ago

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.

extraduder_ire2• 1 year ago

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.

Cthulhu_• 1 year ago

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.

softwaredoug• 1 year ago

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.

ninth_ant• 1 year ago

The why not is because it potentially devalues the prestige of the individual work’s IP, and the brand in general.

This is short-term optimization, par for the course with the new Disovery-owned Warner Bros.

marinmania• 1 year ago

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.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7Eup7JXScZyvRftA2Q5h...

Though I would imagine if you were Tom Hanks or Ryan Reynolds you may be upset some of your least popular work is now the most accessible.

lotsofpulp3• 1 year ago

This stage was set 7 years ago when ATT overpaid for Time Warner by $60B+. There was no way to recover from that.

HelloMcFly• 1 year ago

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.

HDThoreaun2• 1 year ago

WB has decided these movies have no prestige.

derbOac• 1 year ago

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.

greener_grass• 1 year ago

There's a small chance they will get a cult following with more exposure and lead to increase in value of the IP.

tantalor• 1 year ago

Oh nice they got The Science of Sleep (2006) on here, great film with Gael García Bernal by Michel Gondry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAyg_ENvHzc

noneeeed• 1 year ago

I'd forgotten all about that film, it was delightful.

Finnucane• 1 year ago

Saw that in the theater, and remembered liking it quite a bit. May have to watch it again. I recall the animation was quite impressive.

bsimpson4• 1 year ago

Twenty years later, I still remember the images of making a cottonball float like a cloud, and piloting a pneumatic tube of toilet paper rolls.

interludead5• 1 year ago

I like that this article made us reminisce (or for some, discover) old and somewhat forgotten films.

flyinghamster• 1 year ago

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.

boohoo123• 1 year ago

My guess would be offloading storage space while adding monetization revenue.

tombert3• 1 year ago

Is storage space for this significant?

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.

pwg• 1 year ago

The 'offload' might be "building an entire streaming infrastructure".

This way, they get to ride Youtube's streaming system rather than have to build one out.

johnwheeler• 1 year ago

It’s got Suburbia on there.

catlikesshrimp• 1 year ago

Maybe this helps their efforts agaisnt illegal hosting of those old movies? It is available for free for users, and they will keep attacking piracy.

They can at any time substitute the full movies with ads to buy the collection, before IP expires. It is a low cost experiment.

elicash• 1 year ago

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.)

duxup2• 1 year ago

I'm surprised by the quality of some of these movies, they're not no name failures.

tombert3• 1 year ago

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.

meinersbur• 1 year ago

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.

[1] https://www.sagaftra.org/sag-aftra-tv-and-theatrical-residua...

tombert3• 1 year ago

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"?

jerf2• 1 year ago

For your searching convenience, they do seem to have all their full movies in a playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5Y4rNBCLaU&list=PL7Eup7JXSc...

That will pop up to The 11th Hour but the playlist has them all.

akovaski• 1 year ago

A link to just the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7Eup7JXScZyvRftA2Q5h...

From IMDb:

  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)

realce• 1 year ago

Return Of The Living Dead Part II (1988, Zombie Horror Comedy, 5.7)

My favorite zombie flick, if you've not seen it you need to!

JKCalhoun2• 1 year ago

One film from 1962, one 1977, the rest 80's-plus.

Too bad we're not seeing 30's classics, etc.

zoogeny• 1 year ago

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.

canucker20164• 1 year ago

"The Year of Living Dangerously" is a surprising one to show up. Reasonably profitable and successful film for the time.

Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver - she usually doesn't get the romantic role.

She became so enamoured with Mel Gibson that the man whom she eventually married resembles Gibson.

Linda Hunt won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress (her character is male in the movie), she played the "boss" on NCIS-LA TV show for several years.

wikipedia page says 88% on Rotten Tomatoes.

canucker20164• 1 year ago

AVClub on City Heat:

  "City Heat has the misfortune to peak in its first five minutes. "

Spastche• 1 year ago

Hot To Trot (1988, Comedy Fantasy, 4.5)

haha

True Stories (1986, Comedy Musical, 7.2)

watch this if you're a fan of Talking Heads or Spalding Gray

akaitea• 1 year ago

Video unavailable The uploader has not made this video available in your country

so much for that

vintermann• 1 year ago

My guess it's that they do it to discover what "hidden gems" actually have potential, and that they may not stay free.

mcoliver• 1 year ago

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.

fullshark2• 1 year ago

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.

dageshi• 1 year ago

Honestly maybe just because they can?

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.

lxgr2• 1 year ago

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.

SteveNuts• 1 year ago

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.

vlan0• 1 year ago

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.

Similar to running on-prep vs cloud.

aurareturn• 1 year ago

I don't think it's a "hit" for Google. They'll optimize ads to always ensure they make a profit from a view. It's a win/win.

scarab92• 1 year ago

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.

HDThoreaun2• 1 year ago

content is by far the biggest cost for running your own streaming service

SllX• 1 year ago

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

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

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

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

dumbfounder• 1 year ago

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.

TuringNYC7• 1 year ago

> 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.

adrr• 1 year ago

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.

myself248• 1 year ago

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.

lillecarl3• 1 year ago

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!

throwaway48476• 1 year ago

Don't underestimate how cost conscious and inept copyright holders are.

deepspace• 1 year ago

Don't forget the cost of storage. In the days before streaming, WB used to store (digitized) movies on LTO tapes, which are dirt cheap. The programming software would load up a tape the day before broadcast and transfer the contents to disk.

A streaming service needs to have all offered content available on disk. I can absolutely see WB offloading the storage cost to Google.

robertlagrant• 1 year ago

It would be really nice if YouTube could give uploaders the ability to schedule ad slots, rather than them appearing randomly.

Unless they do this already and stuff I watch just does it badly, of course.

meithecatte• 1 year ago

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.

slongfield• 1 year ago

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.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6175006

not2b2• 1 year ago

It appears that the intent of the ad scheduling is to be so annoying that it motivates people on the fence to pay for premium.

paulddraper3• 1 year ago

They do.

rezonant2• 1 year ago

This is absolutely already a feature of YouTube for creators.

n_plus_1_acc• 1 year ago

South Park has been available on their website free to stream with ads.

inemesitaffia2• 1 year ago

Used to be completely free

tootie• 1 year ago

Does YT offer more revenue than something like Tubi?

xattt2• 1 year ago

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.

nix0n• 1 year ago

The resolution was often terrible, somewhere around 240i and 360i.

It's gotten better, though! The digitization of broadcast TV added a bunch of new channels, which are in HD. They have decimal channel numbers.

beretguy• 1 year ago

Youtube also shows ads

Not on my devices :)

paulddraper3• 1 year ago

It takes a lot of YouTube views to add up to a Apple/Amazon/etc rental.

ldoughty• 1 year ago

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

Mindwipe2• 1 year ago

It didn't take them this long.

Several studios have done this for years. Paramount literally did it more than a decade ago.

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/...

joemi• 1 year ago

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.

MartinMcGirk• 1 year ago

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.

rezonant2• 1 year ago

Yes, YouTube fully supports region specific availability and has for a very very long time.

interludead5• 1 year ago

But they're doing it in such an unceremonious way... No real curation, no promotion, just an unorganized content dump.

ghaff3• 1 year ago

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.

CraigRood• 1 year ago

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.

shrikant• 1 year ago

The full list: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7Eup7JXScZyvRftA2Q5h...

godshatter• 1 year ago

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.

andix2• 1 year ago

Free money?

It's probably zero effort to upload them to YouTube. People watch them. YouTube generates ad revenue and pays out Warner Brothers.

They probably choose the movies nobody wants to pay for any more on VoD/DVD and nobody views on paid streaming services.

sureIy• 1 year ago

I wonder if any of them will make back the amount of dollars the intern was paid to upload them.

andix2• 1 year ago

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.

HighChaparral2• 1 year ago

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.

xhkkffbf3• 1 year ago

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.

ValentineC• 1 year ago

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:

https://slate.com/technology/2024/08/david-zaslav-warner-bro...

rwmj• 1 year ago

When Jeremy Irons was asked why he did Dungeons & Dragons (2000), he replied "Are you kidding? I'd just bought a castle, I had to pay for it somehow"

(https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0190374/trivia/)

fullshark2• 1 year ago

Michael Caine's quote about Jaws 4 is similarly great:

"I have never seen the film, but by all accounts it was terrible. However I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific."

canucker20164• 1 year ago

from the Hot To Trot Wikipedia page:

"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"

falcor84• 1 year ago

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?

InitialLastName2• 1 year ago

How do they finance it?

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.

abofh• 1 year ago

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.

bombcar2• 1 year ago

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).

HighChaparral2• 1 year ago

This is the castle in question:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilcoe_Castle https://jeremyirons.net/kilcoe-castle/

It’s quite something. He bought it for IEP 150,000 (around €190,000) but likely spent an order of magnitude more restoring it.

bena2• 1 year ago

I love this.

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.

canucker20164• 1 year ago

wikipedia page for "Hot to Trot", besides Bobcat Goldthwait, has Virginia Madsen, Dabney Coleman, and the voice of John Candy.

Released in that dead zone known as late august, in 1988.

0, zero, null!!!, percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. 22/100 on Metacritic.

Nominated for 5 Razzies - of course, they didn't "win" any.

Don't think I've ever seen it on TV.

bena2• 1 year ago

When it was fairly recent. Maybe a year or two out of theaters

jeffwask• 1 year ago

This is what I thought digital content would be two decades ago.

chatmasta4• 1 year ago

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.

atVelocet2• 1 year ago

What i never understood:

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.

chatmasta4• 1 year ago

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.

duskwuff• 1 year ago

Because that requires extra effort from users. The intention here is to maximize the number of viewers reached, not to be maximally evasive.

coliveira• 1 year ago

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.

chatmasta4• 1 year ago

Yeah I guess that’s the interesting thing - where are the normally litigious studios?

Tinfoil hat time – I’ve noticed these shorts cropping up from shows which are about to be re-released on Netflix…

spelunker• 1 year ago

Ok but how am I going to watch the first three Critters films??

vanderZwan2• 1 year ago

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.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IpNXw6Y05M&list=PL7Eup7JXSc...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mission_(1986_film)

xhkkffbf3• 1 year ago

Certainly "The Mission" is a great film. Absolutely top notch. And with one of Morricone's better scores.

andybak• 1 year ago

I've heard it referred to as "one of the greatest film scores ever written" and it's a defensible claim.

tomaytotomato• 1 year ago

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OIna_nXFxM

wbl3• 1 year ago

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.

What's the difference? Meet any Cathars lately?

zeristor• 1 year ago

For some reason I thought the Eurythmics single "Missionary Man" which came about at the same time was the film tie in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionary_Man_(song)

Mistletoe2• 1 year ago

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.

shermantanktop• 1 year ago

Waiting For Guffman is a great movie...Christopher Guest has done quite a few in this vein but IMO Guffman is the best.

sharkweek• 1 year ago

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.

mrandish3• 1 year ago

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.

jzb2• 1 year ago

1986 qualifies as “old movies” now? Time to fill out that AARP paperwork…

xnorswap• 1 year ago

Would you have considered a 1947 movie as an "Old movie" in 1986?

zvr• 1 year ago

    > Video unavailable
    > The uploader has not made this video available in your country

georgeecollins3• 1 year ago

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.

croes• 1 year ago

Last time I checked there was no age check on the horror movies, which is especially strange for access from Germany

InDubioProRubio• 1 year ago

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?

schnable• 1 year ago

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.

xhkkffbf3• 1 year ago

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.

lotsofpulp3• 1 year ago

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).

dark-star• 1 year ago

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.

soupfordummies• 1 year ago

This is cool!

I do get it, these movies are most likely basically "worthless" for WB at this point.

Hell, I remember seeing Deathtrap and True Stories in the Wal-Mart $5 DVD bin 20 years ago.

This is still better than letting them basically be completely lost/unavailable and the ad revenue makes it a positive cashflow proposition I bet.

anothercoup• 1 year ago

For the same reason the guy wrote an article/ad about it. To make money.

S_Bear• 1 year ago

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.

kindatrue• 1 year ago

The problem might be music rights clearance if they used a lot of contemporary music from actual artists.

extraduder_ire2• 1 year ago

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.

blackoil• 1 year ago

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.

genewitch4• 1 year ago

VOD not PPV

pentagrama• 1 year ago

YouTube playlist with the movies https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7Eup7JXScZyvRftA2Q5h...

tetris11• 1 year ago

surprisingly not that many

pepa65• 1 year ago

There is a huge amount more available on the channel than what is on the linked play list.

Galatians4_16• 1 year ago

Could be for market research. Whichever is the most popular, gets remade or whatever.

daggersandscars• 1 year ago

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.

quxbar• 1 year ago

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.

giancarlostoro3• 1 year ago

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.

bongodongobob3• 1 year ago

"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.

t-writescode• 1 year ago

Early US copyright was something like 20 years + 20 years if they were still alive.

I think the majority of Americans would greatly prefer that model; but, The Mouse had other plans and has extended copyright to approx 100 years.

giancarlostoro3• 1 year ago

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.

LordDragonfang2• 1 year ago

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.

LordDragonfang2• 1 year ago

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.

giancarlostoro3• 1 year ago

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.

bsimpson4• 1 year ago

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.

interludead5• 1 year ago

But I think that the real shame is that there's no true YouTube competitor for ad-supported streaming

brudgers• 1 year ago

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.

penjelly• 1 year ago

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..

pinebox• 1 year ago

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.

jasoncartwright2• 1 year ago

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?

jsnell2• 1 year ago

Also 18 seasons of Taskmaster, which at least I think is fantastic quality.

jasoncartwright2• 1 year ago

Just watched one for the first time today! You are correct.

esskay• 1 year ago

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.

Take a look at their playlists to see what I mean, tons of stuff: https://www.youtube.com/@Channel4/playlists

They've also got other channels, eg you can watych most of grand designs over here: https://www.youtube.com/@Channel4Homes/playlists

Guessing they realised its more profitable to use someone elses bandwidth and run ads.

n0rdy2• 1 year ago

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?

cptnapalm2• 1 year ago

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.

n0rdy2• 1 year ago

Indeed, nostalgia is a great selling point

gymbeaux• 1 year ago

Because they need all the money they can get, they are a sinking ship. Next question.

iancmceachern5• 1 year ago

Check out Peroscope films.

They take public domain footage, mostly us government stuff, and release it and claim copyright over it.

I took some of their public domain footage and put it on YouTube and they freaked out.

Through logic and reason I was able to get them to admit they have no copyright right, as they were initially claiming.

But they did have the YouTube terms of service.

So, back to this.

If they had public domain stuff they wanted to protect, this is another less obvious way to do it.

m_ppp2• 1 year ago

That's interesting, how did you find these guys?

iancmceachern5• 1 year ago

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.

Gshaheen• 1 year ago

A friendly reminder that your local library has a ton of free online access to news sites, movies, and ebooks! Libraries are amazing! Support them!

kouru2252• 1 year ago

The wind and the lion! Took me years to find a digital copy of that movie about 7 years ago

dehrmann• 1 year ago

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.

personalityson• 1 year ago

All of Tarkovsky is on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3hBLv-HLEc

georgeecollins3• 1 year ago

It's been discussed here before but there are amazingly good soviet films available on YouTube.

mrandish3• 1 year ago

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.

Retric2• 1 year ago

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

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

babypuncher• 1 year ago

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.

linsomniac• 1 year ago

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.

Mistletoe2• 1 year ago

I think I would rather eat glass than rent a movie on Amazon Prime for $3.99. I'm so sick of those polluting the search on there.

al_borland3• 1 year ago

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.

interludead5• 1 year ago

Yep, we really went from "everything will be available in one place!" to "good luck remembering which service has what, if it's even still there"

specialist• 1 year ago

...soon pretty much all the old content will just be available on a central streaming service. The future will be good.

I'll buy a TV once any show ever made is available right now for $1 dollar.

During the '00s, I thought surely that'd be in the '10s. Oh well. The '30s aren't so far away.

icnexbe7• 1 year ago

i’ve heard that another reason every studio started their own service was to make it easier to cook the books with profits and losses between the content and the costs of the service

indigodaddy• 1 year ago

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?

billyjmc• 1 year ago

That’s my experience with movies on YouTube so far, yes.

futhey• 1 year ago

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.

dade_2• 1 year ago

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.

bsimpson4• 1 year ago

I work at Google, and I didn't even know that there are good movies you can watch for free with a YT Premium subscription until I saw this article:

https://www.youtube.com/feed/storefront

Includes Roger Rabbit, Billy Madison, Good Will Hunting, Wayne's World, Mars Attacks, Grumpy Old Men, Osmosis Jones, the 90s TMNT movie…

bsimpson4• 1 year ago

Now do Coyote v. ACME!

(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.)

qingcharles• 1 year ago

If Trump signed an EO to release this I might excuse a couple of his other ones.

whycome• 1 year ago

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

propter_hoc• 1 year ago

Oh neat, I have that on my new TV and I never tried it out. Thanks for letting me know about it!

aurizon• 1 year ago

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

xchip• 1 year ago

TL;DR: because they dont have a streaming service

zfg• 1 year ago

They own HBO and HBO Max.

dragonwriter• 1 year ago

TL;DR: because they dont have a streaming service

They have two major streaming services (which they originally planned to merge), Discovery+ and MAX (formerly HBO Max).

firebirdn99• 1 year ago

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

tonymet• 1 year ago

They are not old they are classics

leipie• 1 year ago

Maybe they are republishing the movies in the cheapest way to keep the rights?

HenryBemis• 1 year ago

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.

kiwiguy1• 1 year ago

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

johnea• 1 year ago

Is it even a "release" when it's on youboob?

Will they allow downoad? Will they enforce ads and popups in order to view these movies?

It's more like they gave the licensess to goggle than actually "releasing" the movies...

etempleton• 1 year ago

I think it does two things:

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.

morphle• 1 year ago

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).

jakeogh• 1 year ago

If we stopped watching, they would pay us to watch. Holly wood casts spells.

interludead5• 1 year ago

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

hawski• 1 year ago

At the moment those are region locked.

aucisson_masque• 1 year ago

I think it's pretty obvious.

They think it's going to makes more money with YouTube advertisement than the traditional copy selling.

natemup• 1 year ago

Quite nice that they, unlike the free ones on the "Youtube Movies" channel, can be downloaded by YouTube Premium users without any hassle.

scott_s• 1 year ago

Murder in the First is one of them, and it is a long favorite of mine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X42yOL5Ah4E&list=PL7Eup7JXSc...

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.

lipitic• 1 year ago

For those who are interested, Mosfilm has been uploading a bunch of Russian movies to YouTube for a long time.

You can watch Tarkovsky's movies, for example.

And one of my personal favorites - Kin-Dza-Dza! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYHv8eJrW2Y

neves• 1 year ago

Very nice. Unfortunately no Brazilian Portuguese subtitles.

tveyben• 1 year ago

Great was my first thought - except that I am met with “the uploader have not made this video available on your country” (Denmark). So no value for me…

nusl• 1 year ago

""" 33 unavailable videos are hidden No videos in this playlist yet """

ramon156• 1 year ago

beat me to it, in mere seconds

VagabundoP• 1 year ago

yup geolocked. :(

christkv• 1 year ago

Aaaaand it's gone.

worik• 1 year ago

Not in New Zealand

The uploader has not made this video available in your country

mung• 1 year ago

yep. dickheads.

strobe• 1 year ago

looks like they already removed all of those. I just opened saved playlist and found that non videos available.

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

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