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

[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.

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.

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.