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.
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.
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’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.
> 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
> 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.
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.
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 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)
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
[+] [-] lxgr|1 year ago|reply
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|reply
[+] [-] MartinMcGirk|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] robertlagrant|1 year ago|reply
Unless they do this already and stuff I watch just does it badly, of course.
[+] [-] paulddraper|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] beretguy|1 year ago|reply
Not on my devices :)
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] n_plus_1_acc|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ghaff|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Mindwipe|1 year ago|reply
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/...
[+] [-] interludead|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tootie|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] xattt|1 year ago|reply
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
[+] [-] vanderZwan|1 year ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] tomaytotomato|1 year ago|reply
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
[+] [-] mrandish|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] xhkkffbf|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] shermantanktop|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] zvr|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] zeristor|1 year ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionary_Man_(song)
[+] [-] jzb|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Mistletoe|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mrandish|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] timmg|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jerf|1 year ago|reply
That will pop up to The 11th Hour but the playlist has them all.
[+] [-] akovaski|1 year ago|reply
From IMDb:
[+] [-] akaitea|1 year ago|reply
so much for that
[+] [-] giancarlostoro|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] iancmceachern|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] HighChaparral|1 year ago|reply
Some good stuff on there - shout out to The Mission, which includes one of Morricone’s greatest scores.
[+] [-] xhkkffbf|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] daggersandscars|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ValentineC|1 year ago|reply
https://slate.com/technology/2024/08/david-zaslav-warner-bro...
[+] [-] rwmj|1 year ago|reply
(https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0190374/trivia/)
[+] [-] tantalor|1 year ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAyg_ENvHzc
[+] [-] Finnucane|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] interludead|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] noneeeed|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] whycome|1 year ago|reply
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
[+] [-] personalityson|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] softwaredoug|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] blackoil|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] nusl|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] vintermann|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] fullshark|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mcoliver|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jasoncartwright|1 year ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] jsnell|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] esskay|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bsimpson|1 year ago|reply
(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.)