YouTube May Start Offering Online Pay Movies

September 4, 2009 · Filed Under News · Comment

Popular video-sharing site YouTube is reportedly talking to major Hollywood studios on a deal to stream rented movies which if successful will mark its first move beyond the world of advertising and amateur videos.

Google-owned YouTube was sounding out studios like Warner Bros, Lions Gate and Sony according to reports first published on the online edition of Wall Street Journal. Even though the talks over streaming movies on the video-sharing site are incomplete, sources indicate that YouTube was considering charging a fee for videos as against merely depending on advertisements to fund the movies. However YouTube was likely to settle for this plan only if the videos were available to it at the same time that the DVDs were released in the market.

If successful the deal will place YouTube in direct competition with other online movie rental sites like Netflix, Apple’s iTunes Store and Amazon.com. however YouTube scores over these sites in its massive traffic since it constituted the chief draw among all other Google sites which together attracted nearly 121 million viewers in July this year, according to data provided by comScore.

YouTube till now has been mainly streaming snippets of the latest movies provided by studios or contributed by viewers. If reached, the deal will mark its first foray into the world of professionally produced videos.

Tags: Amazon.com, Apple iTunes Store, Netflix, online movie rental sites, YouTube