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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 tha
by lxgr 2y 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 2y agoI 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 2y agoBandwidth 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.
- DanielHB 2y agoThere are B2B SaaS services for streaming content, you upload the file they host and stream it for you with some API integrations to restrict access. Although I imagine they cost more than youtube's cut from ad-revenue.
- dylan604 2y ago> But running a CDN at that scale is gonna require experience and truck load of money Take Netflix for example. Their CDN at scale is pretty good for VOD type of delivery, but they continue to get it wrong for live event streaming. Even Twit..er, X falls down with their large event live streaming. Adding the "live" component makes everything just that much harder
- ta1243 2y ago> they continue to get it wrong for live event streaming And truly live (which means probably under 10 seconds from lens to viewer - i.e. the time it takes for the "X win" notification to pop up on your phone) is even harder than traditional "live" in the 40-60 second window. Ideally you want all viewer to view it at the same time (so when next-door are cheering on a feed 3 seconds ahead of you it's not spoilt).
- Jakob 2y agoIt’s actually not harder thanks to HLS: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming Live streaming with HLS is equal to distributing static files and can be very low latency. If you need to go below 3s of latency, yes it becomes harder, but everything else is thankfully solved. The bigger issue with live streaming are the peaks: 0 views in one second and millions in the next. Even with static content delivery that leads to all kinds of issues.
- dylan604 2y ago> but everything else is thankfully solved. well, since it's so easy for you, you should apply at Netflix as they can't figure it out.
- Symmetry 2y agoThat's why companies doing streaming at less than Google's scale can pay Aakami or a company like them to do that, caching copies at datacenters around the world close to the people doing the watching.
- aurareturn 2y agoI 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.
- vasco 2y agoGoogle laid fiber cables across the ocean, they already own the whole infrastructure and rent it out. It's a cost only in the sense that they potentially can't sell as much capacity as without their own traffic going down the pipes.
- scarab92 2y agoDon'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.
- aidenn0 2y agoIs Comcast still charging content providers and CDNs for peering?
- inemesitaffia 2y agoYes. And peering with Comcast is almost the same price and transit. deutsche telekom, Telstra and the Korean Telcos also do this.
- mschuster91 2y agoYeah and that is their point. And it's actually highly problematic just how much discount the large giants get on traffic - it effectively blocks any competitors not backed by some very deep pockets.
- sitkack 2y agoGoogle owns a large percentage of the backbone and does not pay for traffic. It owns not just its own fiber, but also leases dark fiber and right of way. Google has been buying railroad for access to right of way to lay fiber since the early 2000s. Peering agreements using their networks give them transit for free on other networks. https://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/02/25/183201/google-is-lighting-up-dark-fiber-all-over-the-country https://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/02/25/183201/google-is-li...
- wbl 2y agoThe reality of these relationships is more complex especially in some markets. It's also not hard to be at the IX and benefit yourself.
- inopinatus 2y agoCloudflare wishes it peered with everyone and steers its own astroturfing pressure groups hoping to achieve that. The economics are similar though; their major product remains DDoS sinking, so driving down the marginal cost of traffic is Cloudflare’s strategy. The difference is that the content they mediate is thereby an incentive towards peering and not the core business proposition.
- HDThoreaun 2y agocontent is by far the biggest cost for running your own streaming service
- dylan604 2y ago"good" content that people want to watch is by far the biggest cost. you can find content for pennies on the dollar, but your viewers will not make it worth the expense as no advertisers will want to spend money with your low viewer count
- SllX 2y agoAh, 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_television https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_ad-supported_streaming_te... [2]: https://www.relay.fm/downstream https://www.relay.fm/downstream
- dylan604 2y agoYouTube serving content with ads would be more AVOD (on-demand with ads) vs FAST. FAST typically means a linear feed programmed to play specific content at specific time just like tuning into a channel on OTA or cable networks.
- lxgr 2y agoThat's how it started, as far as I know, but these services now offer lots of content on-demand as well.
- dylan604 2y agoif it is on-demand, then it is AVOD. A company that started as FAST might have pivoted or decided to release the content they used to program their FAST channel as AVOD as well. I've personally been involved in doing this very thing, but just look at the apps for like Max where they have their linear channel offerings within the same UI as their VOD. While Max isn't ad supported, it's a similar concept.
- sib 2y agoLicensing is distinct for FAST and (A)VOD. That is, a service may have acquired the rights to show a specific title on FAST but not AVOD (or vice-versa).
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- dumbfounder 2y agoI 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.
- TuringNYC 2y 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.
- jmholla 2y ago> Judging from the clunky, buggy, nonsensical experiences on 2nd tier streaming services (i.e., everything except Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Disney+, Max) With the exception of Netflix, these other companies' apps are similarly buggy and painful to use. I run into an at least issue daily (usually multiple times a day) in every streaming app I use except Netflix.
- Suppafly 2y ago>With the exception of Netflix, these other companies' apps are similarly buggy and painful to use. Yeah it's really annoying that they all recreated the wheel instead of just playing ball with netflix or paying netflix to license their technology. The only feature I miss from another service is that x-ray view stuff that Amazon has to let you know who is in a scene.
- sfilmeyer 2y ago>or paying netflix to license their technology Does Netflix license their technology to anyone? I know of examples like BAMTech, although I don't even know if they still take on outside clients or just do Disney now. I get that their might be good options to license and that fewer companies should build crappy in-house products, but is Netflix one of them? From Netflix's perspective, it's not clear to me that the payment for licensing technology to e.g. NBC is worth it, versus hoping that they end up with an inferior product, especially when they're competing with each other for customers and licensed content.
- adrr 2y agoBiggest 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 2y agoIf 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.
- lillecarl 2y agoYep. 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!
- DanielHB 2y agoDamn man, what is going on at Viaplay now? My former team lead used to work there and went back after he left the place where we worked together. This was my intuition as well, unless you are doing B2B (with billing proportional to the streaming) you have to do the hosting yourself.
- lillecarl 2y agoI don't know much anymore, I know they run more ads than content and that they're running very lean. A lot of people had to go when the stock tanked. I have some conspiracy theory that "they" wiped the stock harder than deserved to be able to buy back ownership on the cheap... I had to deal with Viaplay HR recently to get some documents out, took a month to get ahold of someone who could do it...
- DanielHB 2y agoJeez that sucks, was it all due to the decision to offload streaming to 3rd parties? How could they not do any cost estimations? It must have been a huge project that lasted months.
- lillecarl 2y agoViaplay started as a side gig to Nordic Entertainment Group so they started in the cloud and never questioned the decision again, I also got the impression that leadership didn't trust the tech competency and they didn't hire to fix it either. CDN providers are arguably better at CDN than we were, but it's just so expensive. Regarding why the company tanked, I think it was just a part of a bigger problem with inefficient operations, bloat and also going all-in investing in sports without acquiring enough customers. The Viaplay app(s) are quite bad so people find other ways to watch what they want.
- throwaway48476 2y agoDon't underestimate how cost conscious and inept copyright holders are.
- deepspace 2y agoDon'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 2y agoIt 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 2y agoI'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.
- jonas21 2y agoYou need to be in the YouTube partner program, but that's not just available to big creators. You need at least 1000 subscribers and a certain amount of video watch time per year to qualify, but even fairly small channels can meet this bar. When people talk about getting monetized on YouTube, this is what they mean.
- slongfield 2y agoYeah, 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 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6175006
- mrandish 2y ago> However, most creators just click the "insert automatically" button. That seems like a good opportunity for a neural net feature that's smarter than simple scene cut detection. While most theatrical films lack many good spots for commercial breaks, there are certainly a lot of "less bad" spots. Sadly, I doubt YT will bother since they no longer seem to care about viewer experience in recent years.
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- n_plus_1_acc 2y agoSouth Park has been available on their website free to stream with ads.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- inemesitaffia 2y agoUsed to be completely free
- tootie 2y agoDoes YT offer more revenue than something like Tubi?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- xattt 2y agoI’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. /s
- nix0n 2y 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.
- xattt 2y agoI was referring to VHS recording which is limited to less-than-broadcast resolutions. DVD and HDD PVRs for analog broadcasts did capture at 480i but were wildly expensive. Subchannels are an interesting concept, but suffer from compression loss from packing in multiple streams into a single 6 MHz slice that would otherwise be a single channel. Don’t get me started on the fact that we are limited at 1080i as well.
- beretguy 2y ago> Youtube also shows ads Not on my devices :)
- paulddraper 2y agoIt takes a lot of YouTube views to add up to a Apple/Amazon/etc rental.
- ldoughty 2y agoBut 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
- paulddraper 2y agoThat's also true of Apple/Amazon/etc. If you want to make money from a movie, that seems a much better option.
- acomjean 2y agoMy cousin worked at a major network porting programs for rebroadcast (they did some minor updates). They got surprised when a few shows they posted on YouTube got some traction (they became news worthy), getting a decent numbers of views and a check appeared..
- Mindwipe 2y agoIt 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/the-vault-paramount-launches-youtube-channel-with-hundreds-of-free-movies-a6685716.html https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/...
- joemi 2y agoI'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 2y agoActually 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.
- interludead 2y agoBut they're doing it in such an unceremonious way... No real curation, no promotion, just an unorganized content dump.
- ghaff 2y agoI'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 2y agoI 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.
- ghaff 2y agoI'm sure they've got more mature systems in place today. But there's still some threshold of income vs. effort at any company. I freely admit to having no idea what that threshold looks like for a lot of old content--a lot of which was never digitized--at various studios.
- VTimofeenko 2y agoInb4: not my area of expertise, but I worked with a company that was providing data on movie rights. The way I understand it is that it's a Cartesian explosion of complexity under the hood. There are at least rights to a version of the movie and the soundtrack/theme song. They can function independently in a region and are granted exclusively or non-exclusively in a region based on timing. As a bit of a contrived example, you want to distribute Superman 4 in China for a year. You have to secure rights to the film, but you cannot secure rights to the score from the US version as the license is not compatible. You have to get a license-compatible score and make sure the movie complies with the Chinese censorship. And the licensing periods have to overlap. Multiply that by however many regions you want to distribute the movie in and add accounting complexity for each region.
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