But this is the insane bit - there is clearly a market for this. People do want to watch old stuff in new formats, and they're prepared to pay a reasonable amount for it. There is a perfectly reasonable business model in here.

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dylan604 6 days ago | parent [-]

How sure of that perfectly reasonable model are you? Are you willing to find a movie that you think this would be a solid bet, contact the content owner with the money to finance the necessary steps to get the content streaming platform ready? Would you put your money where your mouth is on this?

Edit to add more food for thought. Let's take a non-premium feature film as an example. Let's assume that the title you've chosen has a decent copy of the 35mm film available. To have it scanned at 4K is going to be the first expense. You then have to decide if you're going to clean any of it up with and post production. Color correction will be necessary as well. Something else to consider is do you have any the clips with text on them have and are textless clips available. How much will it cost to get a textless version. You will need to see what audio is available. Hoepfully something other than mag. Do you have just the final mix? Is it stereo/mono? Does it need to be remastered to deal with expired music rights? Do you have elements to do a new mix? Do you have any subtitles available for it? Captioning? Those cost to have made too. Do you have rights for the international versions, and is that content available? Does your streaming platform really want the dubbed audio available? Subtitles for that too please.

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marcus_holmes 5 days ago | parent [-]

Well this is how the "unofficial" streaming services make money, basically.

They don't have the production costs, obviously, so there are some numbers to crunch there. And I don't have answers to any of your questions, because I am not in the industry. I suspect these are a whole bunch of trade-offs, as in most technical questions, and there is a version of these trade-offs that are economically viable.

But people are willing to pay to view stuff, and willing to take risks to view stuff. There is a market there, there's money there. We know this because there are people making money on this.

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dylan604 5 days ago | parent [-]

I am in the industry, and I'm giving you a simplified formula which answers why more titles are not available. You just don't want to accept the reality of it from the content owner's perspective and only see if from the "I deserve to see anything I want anytime I want" perspective.

	▲	marcus_holmes 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, fair point. I counter that I can go and see anything I want, if I'm prepared to accept a bit of risk and some morally dubious justifications. The reality that the content owners face is that there are people making money off their work because they're not giving the paying customer what they want, and those other people are. That's a viable business that they're not profiting from. That's the reality. I'm not sure why it's not visible from the content owner's perspective.