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
My 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..
