Google today added movie and TV show streaming content to its YouTube website. Some of the big names are are Sony, CBS, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, BBC and independent film studio Lions Gate Entertainment. There are advertisements inside the streams and they cannot be skipped, but hey! it's free! A lot of the shows are the "oldies", but you can find some golden nuggets there like the Cliffhanger (1993). To check out their free streams go to a separate section linked from YouTube's main menu, titled Shows.
This is yet another desperate attempt from Google to monetize their online streaming services. The user generated content hosted on YouTube hardly bring any revenue and is hard to pitch to the advertisers, whereas the bandwidth cost to support millions of streams are substantial.
In my view, this is not a serious threat to Hulu as long as they don't bring us fresher TV shows and an expanded collection of online movies. On the other hand, any competition is good for us - users - it will drive up the quality of service and bring down the number of commercials per second.
Legal Online Streaming
Just stumbled on this newer website called IReel. They promise streaming of latest release with a free registration. You get previews and some other features for free, but at the end of the day you would have to pay for movies. I know i know.. I am supposed to keep this blog strictly about finding free streams online, but read on.
I had my qualms with Amazon Unbox streaming movies, so this might be a viable competitor to try out. When I first heard that Amazon started selling streaming movies through their Unbox service I was thrilled to say the least. At the time, about three years ago, this was the only alternative to watch from your computer what you would normally have to go to Blockbuster for. So I bought in, and the first couple of times it was satisfactory, although an average movie would take 3-4 hours to download, so no real-time online streaming per se. It still required to install their proprietary player with DRM and the discounted deals ran out too.
Netflix has been trying to do the same only in combination with their traditional DVD rental program, but promises are to get streaming only video subscription service going by the end of 2009. All these services, be it Amazon or Netflix, in my opinion still suffer from a very poor selection of titles.
There is a decent comparison table of on-demand online video streaming services on wikipedia. Keep checking back as we progress to our final destination - finding a free stream online.
I had my qualms with Amazon Unbox streaming movies, so this might be a viable competitor to try out. When I first heard that Amazon started selling streaming movies through their Unbox service I was thrilled to say the least. At the time, about three years ago, this was the only alternative to watch from your computer what you would normally have to go to Blockbuster for. So I bought in, and the first couple of times it was satisfactory, although an average movie would take 3-4 hours to download, so no real-time online streaming per se. It still required to install their proprietary player with DRM and the discounted deals ran out too.
Netflix has been trying to do the same only in combination with their traditional DVD rental program, but promises are to get streaming only video subscription service going by the end of 2009. All these services, be it Amazon or Netflix, in my opinion still suffer from a very poor selection of titles.
There is a decent comparison table of on-demand online video streaming services on wikipedia. Keep checking back as we progress to our final destination - finding a free stream online.
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