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.
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.
So this is basically just using YouTube as a FAST service.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_ad-supported_streaming_te...
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!
Similar to running on-prep vs cloud.
A streaming service needs to have all offered content available on disk. I can absolutely see WB offloading the storage cost to Google.
"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.
Unless they do this already and stuff I watch just does it badly, of course.
You might have to be a YouTube partner or something like that to make use of this stuff, though.
Not on my devices :)
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/...
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.
/s
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.
* https://www.yahoo.com/tech/sony-succeeded-becoming-powerful-...
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.
Also odd to say that Netflix had the infrastructure already. They built it from scratch.
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.
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)
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?
If anyone has ideas for re-purposing or re-targeting a streaming service, I’m all ears.
No one seems to stay on YouTube when it happens though.
I don't know what you're into but "The Guild" is pretty excellent example of the form.
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.
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.
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...
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
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?
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.
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.
> Video unavailable
> The uploader has not made this video available in your countryThen 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.
Per movie may seem expensive, but at the low end of hours per month watch time streaming services are a bad deal.
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.
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'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.
That will pop up to The 11th Hour but the playlist has them all.
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)My favorite zombie flick, if you've not seen it you need to!
Too bad we're not seeing 30's classics, etc.
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.
haha
>True Stories (1986, Comedy Musical, 7.2)
watch this if you're a fan of Talking Heads or Spalding Gray
"City Heat has the misfortune to peak in its first five minutes. "so much for that
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.
Edit: You're right. Just disregard any laws and contracts in place. HN knows best. It must be that easy.
Under that, everything before 1985 would be free of copyright already.
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.
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.
"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."
"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"
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).
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.
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.
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.
This is short-term optimization, par for the course with the new Disovery-owned Warner Bros.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tinfoil hat time – I’ve noticed these shorts cropping up from shows which are about to be re-released on Netflix…
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.sagaftra.org/sag-aftra-tv-and-theatrical-residua...
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"?
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.
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 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.
This way, they get to ride Youtube's streaming system rather than have to build one out.
They have two major streaming services (which they originally planned to merge), Discovery+ and MAX (formerly HBO Max).
Some good stuff on there - shout out to The Mission, which includes one of Morricone’s greatest scores.
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
(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.)
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.
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).
> The uploader has not made this video available in your country
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.
https://slate.com/technology/2024/08/david-zaslav-warner-bro...
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.
They can at any time substitute the full movies with ads to buy the collection, before IP expires. It is a low cost experiment.
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.)
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…
You can watch Tarkovsky's movies, for example.
And one of my personal favorites - Kin-Dza-Dza! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYHv8eJrW2Y
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.
I am rather curious as to why this is happening now (and happening across multiple countries, apparently) but I kinda like it.
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.
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.
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...
They think it's going to makes more money with YouTube advertisement than the traditional copy selling.
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.
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.
It’s hard to believe how far Hollywood has fallen. I haven’t paid much attention to trailers in years.
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.