Attempting to Leverage YouTube Into Bigger Entertainment Source
Google announced this week that it intends to offer 600+ movie titles from 20th Century Fox on both Google Play and YouTube. This is happening simultaneously with the studio’s new digital HD effort, which is also rolling out this week. This new effort will allow you to watch many of the latest news releases and TV shows on your Android phone or tablet.
The film Prometheus is the first big film by Fox that is going to be released under the new program. It is being released several weeks ahead of the Blu-ray and DVD release of the film.
Other titles that soon will be made available for rent or purchase on Google Play and YouTube include:
- Family Guy
- Glee
- Modern Family
- New Girls
- X Men
- Ice Age
- Black Swan
Fox is trying to generate higher online revenues from its tv shows and films, which often are pirated and watched for free. Google is trying to expand YouTube beyond its original amateur video origins so that it can become a larger source of Hollywood entertainment.
The new partnership between Fox and Google may surprise some who recall the twitter rants by Rupert Murdoch earlier this year. Murdoch, who owns NewsCorp (and 20th Century Fox) said that Google is one of the worst offenders in the world of pirating content.
At the time, Google called such charges ‘nonsense.’ In 2011, Google stated that it removed 5 million copyright-infringing pages from their search results. They also invested about $60 million in fighting bad ads. Google stated that it believes there are ‘smart, targeted ways’ to close down foreign pirating websites without asking US firms to start censoring the Web.