Google To Expand And Market Movie Streaming Service In 2011
Google is expanding its feature film streaming service, says a source who's been briefed on the product. The service will likely be an expansion of the current movie rental/streaming test launched by Google earlier this year.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google has circled paid video before: a Video Store push back in 2006 went nowhere durable, and in September 2009 the Wall Street Journal reported YouTube was in talks to stream rental movies. Earlier this year Google finally launched a small movie rental/streaming test — and this report, sourced to someone briefed on the product rather than confirmed by the company, says that test becomes a marketed feature-film service in 2011.
The timing matters because Google is also pushing into the living room: its autumn 2010 U.S. entry into television via Google TV gave the company a screen in the den but thin premium video to put on it. A serious YouTube-side movie service would give both efforts a content spine.
First-order effects
- YouTube's quiet per-title rental test becomes a marketed product in 2011, putting Google directly into transactional film streaming alongside established rental and download stores.
- Studios become the gatekeepers: the expansion lives or dies on whether rights holders license new-release catalog to Google at terms comparable to what they offer incumbents.
Second-order effects
- Content licensed for YouTube streaming strengthens Google TV's value proposition — the same deals feed both a web service and a hardware platform, raising the stakes of Google's studio negotiations.
- Incumbent digital video sellers face a rival whose default distribution is the world's largest video site and whose incentive can be margin-light, pressuring rental pricing across the market.
Third-order effects
- If Google sustains the effort where the 2006 store stalled, the structural shift is a search-and-ads company treating transactional video as infrastructure — buying or renting content not for direct profit but to deepen engagement across YouTube and connected-TV hardware.
- Repeated attempts suggest video commerce is becoming table stakes for platform companies: whoever controls the living-room screen and the largest streaming audience will keep pressing studios for direct licensing relationships.
The trend: Google is converging its search-scale audience, YouTube, and living-room hardware toward owned video commerce, with studio licensing terms as the recurring bottleneck.