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.
For most viewers, the discretion is worthwhile for better storytelling.
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)
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.
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?
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 !
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
Lots of situations where resolving the rights issues is going to cost more than you expect the movie to bring in, especially once you start talking about splitting the revenue with online storefronts.
If anyone has ideas for re-purposing or re-targeting a streaming service, I’m all ears.
I just speculate that if Blair Witch Project were made today, it would likely debut on a platform like YouTube before gaining wider recognition.
Anyway, not as big as BWP, but still a decent example of the concept under discussion, I think.
No one seems to stay on YouTube when it happens though.
I don't know what you're into but "The Guild" is pretty excellent example of the form.
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.