YouTube to show full length movies from MGM
Hollywood is warming up to the Internet’s top video site. On Monday, YouTube will announce an ad-revenue sharing deal with MGM – home of James Bond, the Pink Panther and Rocky – that will let the site show full-length movies for the first time from a major Hollywood studio. Jordan Hoffner, YouTube’s head of content partnerships, called the agreement a “watershed moment’ for the company: “We are really happy about MGM. They have an incredible library.” It’s easy to understand why YouTube is excited. Founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen want the site to be more than just a destination for clips of skateboarding dogs, experiments involving Mentos and Diet Coke and the occasional Simpson episode that needs to be taken down immediately because of copyright infringement.
After all, there are only so many ads YouTube can put into a short clip like “Tiger vs. Bear.” A feature-length film like “Rocky IV” has room from many more marketing messages. The site is already showing full-length independent movies like “Harold Buttelman, Daredevil Stuntman.” Now YouTube can boast that it has the kind of big budget movies that people can watch on Hulu.com. There’s only one catch. MGM – owned by an investor group led by Providence Equity Partners, Sony and Comcast – will only be posting only a few of its 4,000 movies on YouTube at first.
Source: CNN Money
Comments(19)
cool i guess.
lame i guess.
Definitely a step in the right direction! Cool for the mainstream masses.
It is interesting, but I think I’ll stick with downloading, thanks. I do think the description of YT is fitting, though. “…a destination for clips of skateboarding dogs, experiments involving Mentos and Diet Coke and the occasional Simpsons episode that needs to be taken down immediately because of copyright infringement.”
the problem is……. youtube doesn’t have the bandwidth.
look how long it takes to load and play clips.
youtube sucks for anything other than low quality short clips
I hope they dont do what Hulu does.
If you never used Hulu, its a movie site, great quality, but you get an AD like every 5 minutes.
So its like watching a movie with comercials.
“watershed moment’ typo…
couldn’t think of a worse place to watch movies
Only for residents of the US, for shure.
@6, isn’t it “like watching a commercial with some movie”
plus, it helps comcast users eat up that bandwidth and crawl closer to the cap.
Nice!
Useless now that the major ISPs here in the US will be enforcing data caps.
And who the hell would want to watch youtube quality movies?
Wow, I waited for that. Movies with AR of max 480×360 px and stereo audio. Really great.
awesome, except youtube flash video quality sucks… and flash just sucks in general…
i heard there going 2 start making u pay a monthly subscription yo use youtube that true?
No that’s rubbish. This ad-revenue stuff is just a way for Google to start making some money from YT for a change.
It’s a step in the right direction… but who in their right mind would wait through hours of buffering to watch fuzzy quality films on YouTube, I don’t know.
Still, definitely a start, right?
agree, it’s a start. fair enough.
Hulu.com is stupidest site i ever seen in my whole life!!!
They deliver content only to USA citizens, and Canada?!
Hey…. there is world outside of USA… did you know that
simple solution to the techy community to see hulu when you are not from the usa is the proxy within your browser. faking that you are a usa or canadian.