>> 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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

This is absolutely already a feature of YouTube for creators.

They do.

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

Used to be completely free

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.

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.

> 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.

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

Disney has been profitable lately.

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.

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)

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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).

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/

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

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.

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

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.

> 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.

> 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!

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

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

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.

"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.

> 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

AVClub on City Heat:

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

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.