YouTube Movie Rentals
I could be wrong, but I think it’s only a matter of time until the sale of movies becomes the exception rather than the rule. Personally, I only know a handful of people who even consider actually buying a DVD anymore, and don’t know anyone that buys full length digital movies.
As I’ve talked about numerous times, we’re in a state of flux in regards to the future of television and film distribution methods. The latest entry point is the announcement that YouTube will offer movie rentals for a small amount of the films screening at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
This is a slightly different take on the other methods of distribution that are trying to gain a foothold right now, for several reasons.
- Google (who owns YouTube) has the clout to work with the industry to get things moving.
- Everyone knows what YouTube is. Therefore, YouTube can just put on their front page “Hey, Rent these movies” and they’ve got millions (billions?) of customers right away.
- They’ve been putting their service on a number of connected devices over the past 2 years. TiVo, PS3, Wii, and several others that have proper agreements with YouTube will be able to port this stuff directly to your TV. No hardware from YouTube required.
- Last year, they started to upgrade a lot of their video content to 1080p.
- This year, they are converting a lot (most? all?) of their videos to play back using HTML5, as opposed to Flash. This will help playback issues on slower devices such as netbooks as well as require much less of a buffer.
- They’ve got built in user accounts in place with gmail.
To me, this looks like a recipe for success. I see the future of the YouTube working something like this:
I’m a passenger on a 3 hour trip somewhere. I use my LTE enabled Tablet to watch 2 episodes of Fringe via YouTube as part of my season pass to Fox. For some reason, I have to pause it halfway through the second episode. When I get home a few days later, I sit down in front of my TV, go to the YouTube channel on my connected TV, and play back from where I left off. When that’s done, I decide to rent The Hobbit ($.99 with ads, $1.99 without, no upcharge for HD). No downloading required, I just pay the fee, and I have 30 days to start watching it, at which point I have 48 hours to complete it. I watch half of it, and realize the couch isn’t that comfortable, so I go into the bedroom, fire up my 27″ iMac, and continue where I left off, watching in bed. I think the movie is awesome, and I tell my wife she should watch it. Since our gmail accounts are linked on a family plan (up to 5 users), she still has 24 hours to watch it herself, which she does. Because I read somewhere there was a key scene in episode 3 of Caprica from last season, I watch that episode as part of my hulu-esque setup that YouTube has implemented, where I pay $10 per month to watch all episodes of the 5 most popular shows on 15 different channels, one of which is SyFy (though SyFy probably won’t be in that list in reality).
This is probably the first step to something like the scenario I’ve described above, though I think Apple is working on something very similar as well. Microsoft seems to be doing it too, but I’m not sure their engineers are quite creative enough to come up with something original, so they’ll probably get to market, then have to copy what works that was developed by someone else (see Zune, Xbox, Active Directory, etc).
I don’t foresee this all happening overnight, but if you look at the pieces, they definitely are pointing towards a pretty obvious move.
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