YouTube expands movie rental service

YouTube/Google have finalised talks with Warner, Universal and Sony to provide paid access to movies. Over the coming months, 3000 recent and classic movies will be made available through the online video giant. When a movie is rented, users have one month to watch it. After first pressing the play button, one has 24 hours to finish it. The price for renting will lie between 2,99 and 3,99.

The movies, served in SD-quality, can be accessed not only from a PC, but also from tablets that run Google’s OS Honeycomb and most Android Smart phones. YouTube will also provide extras on the Movie Pages, like Rotten Tomatoes reviews, behind-the-scenes footage, trailers, et cetera. Furthermore, YouTube aims to play to its strength by also posting parodies and remixes produced by the YouTube community.

We wrote about this deal earlier. At that moment, YouTube was still trying to get more studios on board, notably Disney and Fox and Paramount. As some of these studios are working on their own systems for digital distribution, they may have felt that joining the YouTube initiative did not serve their purpose.

For us, Dutch users, the service will not be made available (yet?) Instead, we will continue to rely on the free movies or the 35 hours of video uploaded every minute.

Source: YouTube blog