MGM and YouTube have announced a historic deal to bring movies to YouTube. But content is still clearly an issue, with the first offerings being pretty damn useless.
MGM Studios has become the first major Hollywood company to sign on the dotted line and do a deal with YouTube which will see full-length movies and episodes of television shows broadcast on the site.
YouTube In Bed With Hollywood
Rumors started to spread a few days ago about YouTube trying to tempt Hollywood studios in to doing deals which would see the video-sharing site further evolve from the short-form content it’s famous for.
And while the news that MGM Studios has become the first such Hollywood giant to agree to the deal, the content being initially offered leaves a lot to be desired.
Initial Offerings
Every episode of American Gladiators will be available on its own channel, which sounds impressive until you realize the show stopped broadcasting in 1996.
The first two full-length movies being offered, available on an action films channel, will be Bulletproof Monk, and The Magnificent Seven, the first of which is a terrible film, and the latter of which is almost 50 years old.
Other than that, the deal will see short clips of movies such as Legally Blonde appear on the site, even though it’s already been broadcast in its entirety many times before.
A Fair Deal?
All of these clips, including the full-length content, will have adverts running alongside them, of which the profits will be split between Google and MGM in a similar way to which the CBS deal works.
This is obviously a good move by YouTube and sees the efforts to compete with Hulu and monetize the site successfully raised a notch, but if I’m honest, the initial content offerings suck.
Conclusions
It seems as though MGM want to move in to the world of online video but are only willing to offer up content it makes no or very little money on currently, hence old or poorly rated content.
I expect further deals to follow but, to make this work, the quality of content being offered is going to have to improve considerably.
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