HBO Max Removes 256 ‘Looney Tunes’ Shorts, Three Seasons of ‘The Flintstones’ | Hacker News Reader

HBO Max Removes 256 ‘Looney Tunes’ Shorts, Three Seasons of ‘The Flintstones’

variety.com

33 pointsshscs91126 comments

The problem is HBO max is worse than HBO Go was. Content is less visible and harder to explore. The player is worse. Region restrictions are greater aka worse. I have unsubscribed from HBO max because the content was boring. I'm absolutely not interested in superhero stuff. Then there's a LOT of gay content, which I'm also not interested in. And finally depressing dystopian fiction, which I also don't like. And the drug stuff is also degenerate. Nothing interesting.

In fact none of those pay2streamNotOwn services are attractive. Back to piracy for me. At least I can watch what I like when I like, don't have to be online to do so, can copy everywhere.

The player (on a Roku at least) definitely needs work.

You can't say "I watched this" (perhaps elsewhere) and mark an episode watched. Frustratingly, if you accidentally play two seconds of an old episode it insists that you need to watch it for auto-selection to work.

You can't mark an episode as "go back here and forget I watched from here onwards in the series so I can rewatch" - useful if you want to review again, or if you fell asleep in front of the TV.

I don't know how they leave these things out.

As far as content, I still find things to watch on HBO Max. White Lotus is interesting.

Abandoned art should enter the public domain (this is exactly what happens with intellectual property in the engineering R&D space).

???

This isn't abandoned art.

> The “Looney Tunes” and “Flintstones” content was licensed to HBO Max from Warner Bros. under an intra-company deal. Those licensing agreements expired at the end of 2022 and HBO Max did not renew them, as it seeks to reduce content expenses.

Warner doesn't seem to be abandoning those episodes.

HBO is owned by Warner Bros/Discovery now. Seems like it would make licensing easier.

Unless they're going to "rent out" their valuable properties to other streaming services, and only keep the dregs on HBO Max?

No, it's more like they don't think the current price was worth renewing on HBO Max and could use that money for other content. But they'd be willing to license it to someone else (probably less than what HBO Max was paying, but that's still weirdly a win) if possible.

Under AT&T, the whole idea was to keep basically everything created or owned by Warner Bros. under the HBO Max brand, no matter how much more they could be making if they licensed Friends or Big Bang Theory or whatever to Netflix or Disney or Apple or whoever. Because they saw that as an incentive to get subscribers.

Now that subscriber growth has largely flattened (at least in the US), they are rethinking that idea for properties that don't bring them a lot of subscribers or that don't have a lot of views.

Other streamers probably have zero interest in picking most of this stuff up because they have all gone all-in on producing all of their content in-house and have their own budget struggles, but they could do international licensing or license to FAST (free ad supported streaming television) services in a roll-up. Or they could just not have the content on streaming if they are going to have to pay for it. Vault it up. Which is a real shame, of course, but this is why some of us have continued to buy physical media or iTunes downloads.

Define 'abandoned'? The copyright owner is within their rights to 'rest' their property for a period to increase its value.

They honestly shouldn't be, though. This is by definition a market failure.

Except it's the government standing in the way of supply meeting the demand.

Gross.

That’s a hack. Many would love to do that in my field (materials R&D) due to the increased monetary gain, but that is harming-society behavior.

The usual response to this is: Let’s make copyright terms shorter and charge exponentially-increasing fees to renew the registration. Works that continue to have value to rights holders will justify their registration expense. Works that don’t have value will return to the public domain.

It sounds like a good idea to me but I don’t see it having any chance of it happening.

Rentseeking the public culture.

I guess I disagree that should be within their rights? Seems like a "reasonable people can disagree" thing to me.

I'd just define it as "not making property available for licensing or purchase for X amount of time" or make them subject to lawsuits for not making good faith efforts to license or sell the property. Seems tractable to me, just not necessarily something easily defined in a HN thread.

I figured an alternative angle was to provide a state-managed licensing board.

If the original rights-holder doesn't want to sell, or is intentionally obtuse (i. e. making obvious bad-faith offers), you'd be able to buy a license from the state and the rightsholder can claim the funds from the licensing board.

The pricing would be intended to be "convenience store pricing"-- too expensive to be a good choice most of the time, but when nothing else is available, (or you want something otherwise unobtainable, like a wide-scale blanket license over a large set of content), it's still a better deal than having to go without.

Making your premiumn streaming offer less attractive isnt really signalling your confidence in its sucess.

Or people like the idea of this content but wouldn’t actually watch it. Yeah we’re in the era of streaming companies competing while watching net profits. Everyone’s offer is going to get less attractive. Netflix is going to crack down on shared passwords here soon, for example.

Why is HBO running out of hard drive space or something?

I'm sure they have stats that allow them to figure out how much this matters. If you aren't spying on your customer's usage you should't be in the streaming business.

Just unsubscribed HBO two weeks ago. Dull content, non-familial audience, and extremely hard to use HBO app within LG TV WebOS and ATT/Artemis TV WebOS.

HBO basically missed the market target (me).

This is being done to reduce licensing costs? I figure that just having a lot of shows sitting around on a streaming service is relatively cheap right?

Depends on the content, and sometimes you have to say no as a negotiation tactic so value gets set.

These were probably just very low viewership while being very culturally relevant. People care that they’re gone but not so much that they’d actually watch.

Wouldn't more people cancel or not signup if the perceived value goes down regardless of viewship. Viewship is an easy metric to collect but it ignores perceived value. Netflix has all of the star treks. I may rarely watch a show but if they removed them one of the reasons to have the subscription ceases to exist.

People will pay to have content available even though they have no time to actually watch it.

> Viewship is an easy metric to collect but it ignores perceived value

At a previous analytics job we were working for our client, one of the larger streaming platforms as were trying to quantify value, and more importantly attribution.

Attribution was huge and was still being worked out by the data scientists and then re-worked by marketing C-Levels at the platform. By the time I left, If you signed up for the service and immediately watched "Big Movie" as your first watch, or you finished >50% of "Big Movie" within the first of signup then "Big Movie" was the attributed thing that got you in.

This helped drive decisions (or helped "justify" in retrospect) for day-and-date movies (play on the platform + in theaters same-day), or to take what would have been a theatrical and put it only on streaming.

The viewership could still have been relatively high and the streaming service could still decide not to renew if it was considered too expensive and there was a wish to cut costs.

The deep weird, interesting part of this negotiation is that it is happening "inside the same house": the incoming new management of HBO Max coming from Discovery have made it clear they are looking to cut a lot of costs and care a lot more about that than the value of the content they are cutting, while presumably the old guard still left at Warner Brothers are negotiating for the value of their more expensive to produce (compared to Discovery's niches) content.

From the outside we don't have a lot of details of these negotiations, including whether or not this was highly viewed content on HBO Max. We just see Warner Brothers Discovery punching themselves in infighting, and it is very odd and kind of interesting from this distance.

Probably not. For some shows, like Westworld they take it off so they don't have to pay a royalty and because someone might pay to buy or rent it.

For this, they probably figure it contributes zero subscribers and they could instead put it on a free services with ads and get incremental revenue. They are launching an ad based service.

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