Is YouTube Launching a Netflix Competitor?

RedEaredSlider writes "YouTube could become the latest to offer a movie rental service, challenging streaming sites such as Netflix. Google is lining up deals with major Hollywood studios in order to launch the service. An anonymous executive at a studio that has signed on said Sony Pictures Entertainment, Warner Brothers, Lionsgate and Universal have all licensed their movies to the service. Not everyone is on board — Paramount, Fox and Disney declined to join."

Comments

Good luck with that

[elrous0]

Sony Pictures Entertainment, Warner Brothers, Lionsgate and Universal have all licensed their movies to the service.

How many movies? In what release window? will they be in HD? Will my xbox/PS3/blu-ray player support their streaming? Will they mail physical copies of movies that aren't available for streaming to my mailbox within 24-hours? What's the monthly fee?

Until these and many more questions are answered, I wouldn't call them a Netflix competitor at all. Netflix has established themselves as the guys to beat. And even if you can match their streaming service, you're damn sure going to have a tough time beating their mail service. And their mail service is still where I get most of my movies from them (since streaming is still only available for a fraction of their library). The fact that they're still missing three major studios doesn't give me much confidence that they're going to represent any real threat to Netflix. Blockbuster, Walmart, Apple, Amazon, and Hulu have all tried (often with half-assed efforts) to beat Netflix before. So you had better bring your A-game if you hope to do any better than they did.

Of course, they will decidely have an upper hand over Netflix in offering short videos of guys getting kicked in the groin and whiney teenagers crying about their tough suburban lives on webcams. I'll leave if for others to judge if that's an advantage or disadvantage.

Re:Good luck with that

[AvitarX]

What if it's free?

Google is really good at advertising, and using data to make ads pay more.

It is quite likely that Google can use this to their advantage and be closer to a Hulu competitor, but one that pays the content producers more.

Re:Good luck with that

[Runaway1956]

You know that people can stream from their Linux boxes, don't you? I presume there is Windows and Mac software available that will do the same. Maybe I shouldn't mention that VLC will stream to a file. People might misuse that information . . .

Re:Good luck with that

[iluvcapra]

Paramount:

• Complete Paramount and Desilu film and television library, including all Star Trek syndicated TV and feature films.
• Complete CBS and Viacom television library, Aaron Spelling's library, MTV, Showtime, TNT, SpikeTV...
• Carolco catalogue: Total Recall, Terminator 2, LA Story, Oliver Stone's Stone's The Doors
• Most of the Cannon Films library, which is sortof a laugh but has a ton of genre scifi films from the 80s that we love: Invasion, USA, Runaway Train, Cyborg etc.
• The CW (heh!)
• Basically anything with a Paramount logo on it after 1970. Depressingly, Paramount sold most of its back catalogue off in the 50s. It never held indefesible rights to the Alfred Hitchcock films it produced, those reverted to his estate (thank god).

Fox:

• Any Alien film
• Any Star Wars film (a mixed bag to be sure)
• Any Predator film, any Die Hard film
• 20th TV, so Fringe, Firefly, 24, Family Guy, American Dad , Simpsons, etc.
  

Fox is huge hunk chunk of the contemporary adult library and makes a ton of good new content. Disney:

• Any Pixar film
• Basically any film made in the last 30 years you can take a 10 year old to see without worrying about what's in it
• Bascially any film made previous to the last 30 years that a 10 year old would WANT to see
• Touchstone: Dead Poets Society, almost anything Ron Howard made in the 80s, Wes Anderson's films, Who Framed Roger Rabbit
• Much Jerry Bruckheimer, through Touchstone of Hollywood Pictures: The Rock, Pirates of the Carribean, but older films like Con Air and The Ref to name only a few.
• ABC Studios: Lost, Scrubbs, Desperate Housewives, Grey's Anatomy
• Hollywood Pictures, genre films of the 90s: Arachnophobia, etc.

These three studios control maybe half the modern library real estate. Warner Bros, controls basically the entire classic film library, Sony much of the remaining TV and both control most of the remaining franchises.

Not really competing with Netflix

[Sonny Yatsen]

Is Youtube's business model really competing with Netflix? The 24-hour $2.99 rentals look and feel a lot more like Amazon's video rental service (excluding Prime) than it does Netflix's all-you-can-eat model. Frankly, I think this model is kind of doomed from the get-go. Amazon and Apple have tried this kind of video rental service, and while I'm sure it's somewhat of a success, it has done absolutely nothing to stop Netflix from gaining market share and subscribers. Even Amazon realizes that the future of video services lie in all-you-can-eat services like Netflix rather than per-title rentals. And, frankly, I think that's what most consumers nowadays want anyway. Unless Youtube is going to actually go toward a more Netflix-like model, or find a model that's even more appealing to consumers, I can't see it as being terribly successful.

Re:Not really competing with Netflix

[Desler]

Until they have a sizable catalog an à la carte approach is more appealing to me.

So you can spend more for less?

The majority of the public does not realize

[tepples]

You realize it's dirt easy to just connect your laptop to your TV with just one cable?

Three problems:

1. Only if it's a laptop, not a desktop PC. A lot of people don't have the PC close enough to a TV, nor are they willing to buy a PC just for the TV cabinet.
2. Not if it's an SDTV. Most PCs don't come with S-Video or composite outputs. There was a time when most laptops had S-Video, but most people I met didn't realize one could turn S-Video into composite with an appropriate cable, and besides, laptops have started to omit S-Video in favor of HDMI.
3. I realize this, but I'm in no way a representative sample of the general public. Even among HDTV owners, the majority appear not to realize that a VGA+audio or HDMI cable connects a PC to a TV. See previous comments: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7.

Great, Market Fragmentation

[EmagGeek]

I can see it now.

Netflix will have an exclusive agreement with one group of studios.

Google will have an exclusive agreement with another group of studios.

Amazon will have an exclusive agreement with yet another group.

The result will be that you'll have to buy all three services to see all the movies you want... I can't wait.

Re:Great, Market Fragmentation

[xMrFishx]

...and it still won't exist in Europe.

If that form of media appeared over here, it would be interesting to see if it would hold up to anti-competitive scrutiny. I'm already quite convinced the movie companies operate as a cartel if you look close enough at their consumer pricing, yet no one has picked them up for it (I don't think).

Re:Great, Market Fragmentation

[MBGMorden]

Apples to Oranges comparison. None of the online services come close to the quality of a Bluray Disc.

No, they don't. HOWEVER, all of them have a quality that is basically as good as I'd ever care to watch. They all have decent 720p available at a minimum, and truthfully I have no issue with 720p. As a matter of fact, Aside from a side by side comparison (and even then I'd have to look closely), I can't even tell the difference between 720p and 1080p.

Re:Is it going to work on TV?

[hawguy]

You realize it's dirt easy to just connect your laptop to your TV with just one cable?

You're overestimating the technical knowledge of at least 80% of consumers -- I'd never be able to talk Dad through hooking up a VGA cable between his TV and laptop and then get him to use the computer to watch video. And of course, a single cable only gets him video since his laptop doesn't support HDMI out, he'll have to find a 3.5mm to RCA cable to get audio. And he'll want a remote control, so that's one more item he has to buy and set up.

I sent him a Roku and he was up and running in an hour.

Youtube will need the same hardware device support as Netflix if they want to become a real Netflix competitor. I suspect they are already on their way there - my Bluray player has both Netflix *and* Youtube support. I've watched a few Youtube clips, but the quality was way subpar - though that is probably due to the source material, I'm sure movies would be better quality.

Re:Disney

[blair1q]

That only happened because until they did it was running neck-and-neck, with several major studios working both sides of the street, and there were only a few of the bigs left to decide. Whichever one of them had chosen, the others would have followed.

As for Netflix, its selection is vastly overrated. They do have Star Trek on disc and instant. But they've probably got 5% penetration to the universe of movies, and 20-30% in terms of recent titles.

Which means they have lots of growing room, but also lots of room for competitors. And since delivering content online is pretty easy if you buy a big enough server, the content owners can just run their own show. No need for an aggregator at all. If there's a client on the user's hardware that can browse and access and play it.

Oh look. Netflix is based on Microsoft Silverlight, which anyone can purchase a server license for.

Disney is not a joiner

[argStyopa]

Disney not joining is meaningless and unsurprising.
Disney is nearly Luddite when it comes to distribution technologies - they refuse EVERYTHING at first, and are only dragged in later when the cash pile becomes too big to ignore.

DIVX (the original crappy planned-expiring rental disc technology, not the codec)
Didn't they even refuse to put their films on DVD at first, out of piracy fears?

Didn't think I'd champion Silverlight...

[HerculesMO]

But YouTube's "buffering" and Flash problems are worse for me than Netflix has *ever* been in streaming content. I can watch a movie in HD and if my connection starts to suck, the movie starts streaming at a lower quality in order to keep playing. Flash can't do that, and YouTube can't do that.

So no, I think that until we are all on HTML5 (no time soon) or until Google decides to use Silverlight to do the streaming, Netflix has no competition in this space.

Buffering

[josteos]

Youtube can't handle streaming shitty homemade movies without ...buffering.... and ..buffering.. and ..buffering..

I can't wait to see how they handle feature-length films where quality matters.