Thursday, April 28, 2011

Behind the Times.

While reading this Wall Street Journal article this afternoon for my advanced marketing class, I discovered a pretty interesting fact about one of our favorite social media sites, YouTube.
Though it wasn't a front page story or anything, actually it was in the Marketplace section (really the only section I usually flip through), the article was pretty big and even included a large colored picture. Basically the article was telling about how Youtube has been renting movies since 2010 -- something I was not aware of -- and is planning to increase their collections and add in more recent movies to be available at the same time that they come out in video stores. This new addition would be great for YouTube and make them more competitive with video stores, television shows and OnDemand programs. Also, by offering the new titles that it hopes to, it would also be competing with Netflix, which only offers older films that you can watch online for a monthly fee.
This came as a surprise to me, though, as well as the fact  that YouTube was the number two search engine on the net. It's a great idea for Google to use YouTube for renting movies as well as a video sharing site and I think that it will continue YouTube's growth and influence on the Internet. The only thing that concerns me with renting a movie from YouTube is how the video will load, because here at ONU and with a less than reliable connection all the time, it can be a terrible pain trying to load a four minute video -- let alone an hour and a half worth of a video.
So if you're behind the times like me and not too familiar with all of YouTube's options and offerings, then go check out the YouTube Store, which apparently you could have rented movies from since 2010 and soon to more and more recent movies too! You can also watch some of the really old movies for free in the movies tab.

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