In today's New York Times, Miguel Helft reports that YouTube is negotiating with major Hollywood studios over an agreement that would allow the web video service to stream feature-length movies to users for a fee:
YouTube Said to Consider Pay Movies (New York Times)If a deal is reached, it would be a major change for YouTube, which has largely offered free content supported by advertising. It would also put YouTube, which is owned by Google, in direct competition with services from Netflix, Amazon and Apple, which allow users to buy or rent movies online.
YouTube, which already offers some older free movies on its site, is talking with Lions Gate Entertainment, Sony and Warner Brothers about making newer titles available on the site, the person said. Scott Rowe, a spokesman for Warner Brothers, declined to comment, and representatives for the other two studios were not immediately available.
RSS Feed
Who in their right mind would pay Youtube to watch feature-length films which (judging by their current video encoding) snarf absurd amounts of bandwidth just to produce a lame, analog TV-quality picture... when they could instead use Netflix, and probably pay notably less money in the long run?
Building a serious business venture on the hope that there will be a large number of morons with disposable income and not enough sense to use the obviously superior pre-existing alternative seems like a Really Bad Idea.
First the ads, now this. Too much excitement for li'l old me!
@AirPillo
Not being in the US, I can't use Netflix. I am all for more ways to pay to stream movies.
@AirPillo
Some of the 'hi-def' stuff on YT isn't terrible these days. And one would think Google would have the business sense to make sure if they were offering something for a price, they would make sure it was quality content that would be able to compete with what is already out there.
Netflix costs me about $1.50 per movie. I can't see switching to YouTube, which spends an awful lot of time glitching and being down for maintenance.
The first twitches of DVD's death nerve?
And about time too.
And for many users the amount of online views they get is unlimited in addition to whatever they rent hard copies of...
... Though I did fail to think of non-US residents as was pointed out, this could be handy to them, yes.
"... Though I did fail to think of non-US residents as was pointed out, this could be handy to them, yes."
If, and only if, the studios don't insist on geo-blocking the crap out of the service.
Currlently "Netflix, Amazon and Apple" offer me nothing. I have low expectations of any YouTube-studio deal.
Geo-locking is a one of the benefits (from the Studios' point of view) of this "delivery vector".
I like it. While I'm not crazy about the video compression in YouTube, I still go there a lot. While the service is still losing money, I'm hopeful about a scheme like this to at least make them break even. I don't know if I'll be using the pay service right away, if at all, but I'll still be interested in seeing what happens.
If Hollywood expect me to pay a premium price for higher quality BlueRay movies, I hope they also expect me to pay a cheap discount price for poor quality streams.
I think it's safe to assume they'll have higher quality streams for paid content. Possibly they'll even revisit their brain dead streaming/caching algorithms. What excites me the most is that in the process of deploying this, they might incidentally hire one person who understands aspect ratio. And that person might take the couple of hours required to add an aspect ratio cycling widget.
Is it such a crazy dream? I'm not asking for fast forward, rewind, keyboard navigation, full screen that doesn't go away the instant you do anything in another window on another screen, etc. That's all clearly beyond your capabilities. Just let me force the video into the correct proportions. Youtube, I can help you with the math if you need it.
If the film studios released better movies on Blu-Ray rather every shite summer blockbuster I think they would sell more discs. That being said when is HBO going to stream True Blood?! AHHHHHHHHHH!
You can't stream Netflix movies on Linux, that's a plus. Of course Redbox DVD rentals are just a buck, so I wonder how much they can charge.