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According to Washington Post, YouTube is expanding its online video store making more videos available for streaming while they are released on DVD. The decision was announced a few days ago, making clear that the competition in the market keeps escalating.
Google-owned YouTube is trying to lure business away from the competing services like Apple’s iTunes and Amazon.com, which are also engaged into renting online videos on a pay-per-view basis. Meanwhile, 3 services together are hoping to undercut Netflix, which accounted for over 13 million customers within the past 2 years at its subscription video service.
As today the popularity of watching videos through high-speed Internet connections rather than on DVDs is rapidly increasing, YouTube announced some new licensing deals it reached with a few major movie studios. The service promised to add around 3,000 titles to its rental library. Unfortunately, the library in question is only available in the United States. Thus, the service would account for 6,000 rental selections over a year after it launched the store. Earlier, few of the videos released in this rental store were available at one time with the DVD releases, which apparently put YouTube at a competitive disadvantage.
Now the major part of YouTube’s videos rent for $3-4 per viewing, which is comparable with similar services. At the same time, the streaming library of Netflix accounts for over 20,000 titles, and provides more attractive conditions: the service offers its users an unlimited amount of viewing for only $8 per month. However, few of its titles are available at the same time as the DVD releases.
When YouTube opened its rental store, it was clear that the service has evolved from a website for homemade videos to a large outlet. However, it still takes time to win over Hollywood, as YouTube appeared as a haven for pirated videos right after the service had been launched 6 years ago. After Google purchased YouTude a year later, it imposed more anti-piracy tools. Nevertheless, some movie studios are still unhappy with YouTube: for example, Viacom Inc. is currently trying to revive a lawsuit asking for over $1 billion in damages for alleged piracy, and this is despite the fact that a federal judge has already ruled once that YouTube had not broken the law. Naturally, Viacom-owned movie studios refused to rent their movies through YouTube, but NBC Universal, Warner Brothers, and Sony Pictures have already agreed to do that.
