YouTube Gets Feature Movies

YouTube.com will begin offering full-length films produced by at least one of the biggest Hollywood movie studios as early as next month. Google has been struggling to find a revenue stream from YouTube.com and also struggling with commercializing the Internet property. In my personal opinion the guys at Google are panicking because they realize a lot of the popularity of YouTube.com is from the fact that you can get a lot of pirated videos and TV clips and other music videos on it. But as a lot of that ripped content has been taken down by many of the movie and media giants Google is looking for the next best thing to keep this site growing and making money.

The service that they are going to be starting is going to offer ad supported full-length movies. Which sounds a lot like Hulu.com to me. Which I like that service to so I am sure I am going to be giving this one a try as well. But I doubt any of these services are really going to be taking anyone away from their DVDs or cable. The quality just isn't high enough for you to enjoy it on many Hi-Def televisions. But throwing the kids in front of some cartoon right off the Internet is pretty nice.

Right now it seems that the big hang up Google has been having with getting feature-length films on the Internet video site is the fact that they are insisting on certain types of ad formats. They don't want the advertising inside the videos to follow what's currently on TV. They don't want the movie to actually be interrupted by the advertising. So so the advertising they prefer is to have a video playing with an ad inserted in the beginning of it and then maybe an ad inserted at the end.

I'm glad to see YouTube.com and Google cutting a deal with the movie companies but I think we're a long distance away from actually reaching a satisfactory deal. At least one that will make us viewers happy as well.