Google Adds Over 600 New Rental Titles to YouTube and Google Play
April 18, 2012
By Ashok Bindra, TMCnet Contributor
Google (News - Alert) announced in a blog post on Monday that it has inked a new partnership deal with MGM to bring more than 600 new MGM titles for rent to YouTube and Google Play users in the U.S. and Canada. As per the blog post, MGM joins five of the six major studios and over ten independent movie studios, currently offering movies for rent on YouTube (News - Alert) and Google Play.
For nearly 90 years, MGM has brought some of the best and most memorable films to the silver screen. Through this new partnership with MGM, Google has started expanding the rental titles, wrote the blogger Jonathan Zepp, YouTube’s manager of TV/Film content partnerships.
According to a recent IHS Screen Digest study, online movie watching in the U.S. will double this year and will make up the majority of people’s home entertainment viewing. As per the study, online movie viewing in the U.S. will exceed digital video disc (DVD) and Blu-ray use for the first time this year. Legal online viewings of films will more than double to 3.4 billion this year from 1.4 billion in 2011, the market watcher’s study reveals. Physical viewings of DVDs and Blu-ray discs will shrink to 2.4 billion from 2.6 billion, according to the forecast.
Thanks to MGM, “you’ll be able to join in this trend and grab its movies online and on the go,” Zepp said in the blog post. He added, “From timeless love stories like West Side Story and Moonstruck, to sci-fi action films like The Terminator and Robocop, to modern classics like Rain Man and Rocky, you can now rediscover MGM’s moviemaking magic on Google Play and YouTube.”
Venture Beat reporter Sean Ludwig wrote that YouTube has been offering movie rentals through a dedicated store front since April 2010. Since then, it has continued to add to its library of rentals via partnership signed deals. However, as per Ludwig’s report, Google Play is a newly created media hub. “With MGM in the mix, both YouTube and Play will have even more options,” wrote Ludwig.
Edited by Jennifer Russell