YouTube Works Deal With Studios, Gets Movies The Same Day As iTunes

Tweet

Suddenly iTunes has a little more competition in its arena, as we discover that the folks out at YouTube (still backed by Google, which is rapidly shaping up to be the anti-Apple in most every way that counts) have landed a deal with several studios to get streaming video content on YouTube the same day it’s available on iTunes.

The most recent deals were reported with Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal, and Warner Brothers, which represents a pretty substantial chunk of video. This isn’t the beginning of YouTube’s streaming ambitions–they’ve already been operating the YouTube Store for the last year or so now in which streaming video is available in a variety of titles (and a fairly substantial variety, too–they’ve even got the High School of the Dead anime out there!) and payment is satisfied through Google Checkout. From the look of it they at least had a content deal with Lions Gate to start with (they had Saw, and that’s all Lions Gate.), but this definitely ups their numbers substantially.

Corporate politics came into play, though, as Fox, Disney and Paramount (Disney is reportedly substantially owned by Steve Jobs) all turned down YouTube’s offers to join in.

The on-demand version of this is set to start within the next week or so, while future moves are set to include sell-through, allowing you to own a movie you’d stream through YouTube.

More and more places are moving to streaming, and it’s a fairly decent idea as long as the infrastructure can keep up. Naturally, it’ll be a good long time before physical media is completely supplanted, but it looks like that’s the direction we’re moving in. Will the bandwidth issued be settled before physical media is lost for good? That remains to be seen, but it’s probably going to be the single biggest factor in seeing just how fast streaming media becomes the new standard of home entertainment.