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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.
by timmg 2y 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 2y agoagree. 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.
- browningstreet 2y agoI'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.
- wslh 2y agoCould 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).
- ryanmcbride 2y agoIndie film makers release a lot of their work on youtube.
- browningstreet 2y agoThere hasn't really been a Blair Witch Project movie happening on Youtube yet...
- wslh 2y agoI get that the real issue isn't just YouTube, but that no other horror film, or otherwise, has really matched Blair Witch Project's combination of impact, marketing success, micro-budget, and cultural phenomenon. I just speculate that if Blair Witch Project were made today, it would likely debut on a platform like YouTube before gaining wider recognition.
- mindcrime 2y agoThe best example I can think of is already mentioned up-thread, but just to drill down on that. Kung Fury[1] was initially released on Youtube (and a few other services, mostly in other countries I think) and became a pretty big viral hit. Enough so that the filmmaker eventually signed a deal to make a sequel[2] with distribution by a traditional film company and some big-name stars. Unfortunately the release of the sequel has been held up for "legal reasons" and FSM only knows when or if it will see the light of day. :-( Anyway, not as big as BWP, but still a decent example of the concept under discussion, I think. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Fury https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Fury [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Fury_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Fury_2
- ryanmcbride 2y agoJust because the quality of the things people upload there isn't up to the arbitrary standards of "as good as the Blair Witch Project" doesn't mean its less valuable
- duxup 2y agoI'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?
- browningstreet 2y agoI have a list of movies you can't find anywhere, not even for pay, not even on on obscure services. I check every once in a while to see if they pop up (JustWatch.us is great for this, IMDB is copying). Example: "Amateur" by Hal Hartley, though it's easy enough to buy copies on DVD. The problem is once the rights for a title end up in a library, the accessibility considerations operate at the library level, not the title level. So if some company owns the rights to "n" titles en masse, they're negotiating for the distribution rights to that library. You can't really pull a Taylor Swift or Def Leppard "re-record for rights" move with movies. UPDATE: Happy to be wrong about my cited example.. Thanks @andsoitis !
- a_imho 2y agoNot sure how obscure you are willing to go, but a quick look on private trackers do list the movie.
- andsoitis 2y ago> browningstreet 43 minutes ago | root | parent | next [–] I have a list of movies you can't find anywhere, not even for pay, not even on on obscure services. I check every once in a while to see if they pop up (JustWatch.us is great for this, IMDB is copying). Example: "Amateur" by Hal Hartley, though it's easy enough to buy copies on DVD. It IS available to stream! See https://www.halhartley.com/amateur https://www.halhartley.com/amateur
- browningstreet 2y agoTou-freakin'-che
- mason55 2y ago
- ANighRaisin 2y agoThere have been more niche shows that became quite popular after a YouTube release.
- eptcyka 2y agoMovies 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.
- al_borland 2y agoThese old movies have already made their money. Anything they can get now is just gravy. It’s a Wonderful Life is popular because the copyright expired and TV stations could play it for free. Playing it so much got people to watch, and now it’s a classic. It bombed originally. Putting old movies on YouTube gives them a chance at a second life, and the studio doing it, means they can still earn some money on something that would otherwise just sit in a vault somewhere.
- eptcyka 2y agoI don’t disagree with you, but the original commentor posed the qeustion Why don’t indie film producers choose to premier on YouTube?.
- dehugger 2y agoKung Fury would be my go-to example of "viral indie release".
- illwrks 2y agoMovie 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.
- delecti 2y agoYoutube has the ability to limit videos to certain markets. One example is that the entirety of Mythbusters was uploaded in the past couple years, but isn't available to view in the US.
- illwrks 2y agoI wasn't really aware of this, I guess using a VPN would get around the issue though?
- crashingintoyou 2y agoHave you never gotten an error about something being unavailable in your region on Youtube?
- fsflover 2y 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/ https://joinpeertube.org/. It can even decrease the load to your servers by spreading the trafic over peers.
- andsoitis 2y agoCreating and running a (direct to consumer) profitable streaming service takes a lot more than just “infrastructure”.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- fsflover 2y agoWhich problems are you expecting if you already have the content, the servers and the software? It's a famous company; people would definitely watch their movies for a small payment or with ads.
- jerf 2y 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.
- browningstreet 2y agoGot some recommendations?
- cons0le 2y agoOn youtube , watch Space King
- tart-lemonade 2y agoIn a similar vein, I remember reading somewhere that creating shows for direct-to-streaming is liberating because, although it is quite similar to TV in that it's telling a story in chunks (usually 30 to 60 minutes) without a guarantee of continuation (renewal), you don't have the primary constraints of traditional television: fitting into a specific time slot, saving time for commercials, and creating hooks that lead neatly into each ad break to get the audience to stick around.
- korse 2y agoI 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 2y agoI'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 2y agoI 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/ https://m.imdb.com/name/nm10735410/
- wongarsu 2y agoRooster 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)
- bombcar 2y agoApparently one of the original Rooster Teeth guys bought the rights back and is going to do something ...
- nabeards 2y agoAs 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.
- philistine 2y agoGo for international movies. A lot of them have incredibly convoluted rights, so the biggest expense is going to be negociations, but if you can become a destination to find obscure films from varied countries, it might be possible to eke out a slice of the pie.
- al_borland 2y agoThere is a price to pay for the control they’re trying to maintain. That price is called profit, in most cases.
- bluedevil2k 2y agoThe 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-arms-220000696.html https://www.yahoo.com/tech/sony-succeeded-becoming-powerful-...
- enragedcacti 2y agoIs 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?
- mason55 2y agoSure - that's why Sony is the winner. Other companies tried other things and lost. Now they see what the winner did and they're following their lead. When WB started all this it wasn't clear what the winning strategy was going to be. Now that it is clearer, they're just following.
- com2kid 2y agoWarner Bros didn't buy out Discovery, other way around really. In return for taking on loads of debt, Discovery got ownership of WB. HBO Max was an incredibly lean org, around 200-300 engineers at launch, 1/10th the size of its competitors but we launched a similar scaled service (tens of millions of domestic users, followed up by international launches one after another). IMHO once COVID ended and HBO Max just became a streaming destination instead of having movies "launched" on it, they'd be just fine in terms of profit (and indeed iirc the successor Max service is profitable). First releasing big block busters doesn't drive enough user growth to pay for the movie, but if you have an existing content pipeline then having a streaming service as another delivery platform becomes reasonable.
- jandrese 2y ago
- extraduder_ire 2y agoIt'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_ 2y agoIf 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.