Google adds Movies, TV Shows

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.