Recently, there has been news about YouTube's move to rent out videos. As a test, and pending talks with big movie companies, YouTube is offering five Sundance Festival films for rent from January 22 until the 31st. Viewers who would want to see the films would have to pay $3.99 to rent the videos (i.e. see it on the YouTube channel) for a limited period.
Would people buy it? Some might, first dibs on high quality movies? Who wouldn't want that? However, probably also from the idea being new, more are skeptical on whether or not this would work. For one, there are other sites who also offer movies - for downloading or streaming - for free. Why watch something where you would have to pay? Second, not all have access to internet services like this. Not all have credit cards to pay for it. Not all countries have this service available for them (there's even a comment of one user: "...it doesn't work outside US. Do you know the world is not only US? "). Not all have fast and reliable internet connection. From what I heard, if you lose internet connection while watching a movie from YouTube, you would have to repeat the whole movie and you cannot just go to the scene you have last seen. Anyway, these movies would be available for viewing (for free) after a few months on HBO, Star Movies or any other cable network and even released on DVD.
From what I heard, YouTube wanted to do this because they only get income from advertisement offers, who would give more for these kind of films than home made videos of dogs saying "I wuv you" or babies being cute. But renting out videos has been a slow business nowadays (for example, few people would now go to Video City…or even know what Video City is). "Broadcast Yourself", says YouTube. "But now you have to pay before anyone could see you."
No comments:
Post a Comment