YouTube, the most popular online video sharing site has decided to go the Hollywood way! Yes folks a movie-on-demand service via YouTube is imminent which means that millions of users who access YouTube will be able to stream the latest and hottest movie releases for a cost as low as 2 Dollars! While this is fantastic news for millions of YouTube fans, mainstream services such as the Apple iTunes would be feeling pretty queasy at this development.
Speculations are that the service may start as early as this week or the next. YouTube has an estimated 130 million monthly users so if a deal is struck it would turn out to be a goldmine as the movie purchases would rake in a large amounts of revenue for both the studios and the Google owned YouTube. This new service is being considered as a head on challenge to online video streaming giants such as the Apple iTunes service and Netflix. This is Google’s first attempt in the paid video streaming sector.
YouTube had earlier declined to comment on the development but later came out with this statement:
We’ve steadily been adding more and more titles since launching movies for rent on YouTube over a year ago, and now have thousands of titles available, Outside of that, we don’t comment on rumor or speculation.
While a senior executive at a Hollywood studio had these views:
We think it will start with VOD, but broaden to include sell-through over time, and we are happy to see new entrants come in transactionally rather than a subscription model.
Sony Pictures Entertainment, Warner Brothers and Universal studios are three of the six major film studios in Hollywood that have reportedly agreed on the terms and conditions to license their content for the video giant. Paramount and Fox, reportedly, have not committed up til now.
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