YouTube and MGM in movie and TV show deal

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 10 November 2008 16:57

Opinion and Analysis

And even if MGM surprised us all by allowing anyone to watch its video clips, we still live in a “region coded” world, despite the Internet and globalisation.

Moving towards a region-free world is taking far longer than the reality of DRM-free music, something the world still suffers despite DRM-free being an option for some tracks, but not yet all.

Reuters reports that the “decade old American Gladiators” TV show, and movies such as “Bulletproof Monk” and “The Magnificent Seven” are but some of the coming attractions, and advertising will apparently appear “alongside” the content.

This could mean ads being played before, during and after the video, as YouTube already does with its CBS full length shows, ads appearing on the content’s YouTube page as display ads, or both. No doubt some other way of advertising will be thought of as well to maximise viewer dollar.

It also pushes commercial TV networks in other countries to create their own Hulu streaming sites or to do deals with the YouTube subsidiary in those countries, with many more patchwork deals likely despite sites such as Joost offering much content on a global basis.

Still, a big sticking point is your download limit, something that gets chewed up by the surfing and downloading you already do, operating system and software updates, voice and video calls, online gaming, console generated data usage, downloads of movie and TV shows to Xbox 360, Apple TV and PS3 devices, p2p/torrent downloads and more.

While these limits remain low or higher limits too expensive in many countries, downloading hundreds of megabytes or gigabytes of data for many will chew through download limits too quickly, or cost too much in monthly download fees.

This means much work still needs to be done between content owners, ISPs and content delivery companies such as Akamai and users to ensure the Internet video revolution truly blossoms beyond where we are today.

It also brings up the net neutrality debate, to which there is still no real answer. In the meantime, US citizen or no, you can use your existing download limit to watch some full length content online, now with ads!