|
April 9 (Bloomberg) -- Sony Corp.’s entertainment division said it is in talks to post movies on Google Inc.’s YouTube video-sharing Web site.
“We are having conversations with YouTube,” Paula Askanas, a spokeswoman for Sony Pictures Television in Los Angeles, said yesterday in an interview. She declined to provide additional details.
No major U.S. movie studio posts full-length films on YouTube. Sony Pictures offers 60 older films, including “Stripes” and “Groundhog Day,” as well as vintage television shows, at its Crackle.com Web site. Hulu.com, whose owners include NBC Universal Inc. and News Corp., shows advertising- supported full-length movies.
Hollywood studios, under attack from film piracy, are trying out older movies on the Internet as they search for ways to accommodate viewers’ changing demands without cutting into revenue from DVDs and pay-television. By putting content on YouTube, the Internet’s most-viewed video site, studios gain access to a larger audience.
“YouTube can help promote their videos,” Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst at Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Forrester Research Inc., said in an interview.
YouTube wants “more high-quality content,” Owyang said. “They really want to up their game.”
Chris Dale, a spokesman at San Bruno, California-based YouTube, declined to comment yesterday on talks with Sony or any other studios for feature films. The Web site already carries long-form content from independent filmmakers, Dale said.
Professional Content
Google, the Mountain View, California-based company that also owns the most-used Internet search engine, rose $3.35 to $362 yesterday in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The shares have gained 18 percent this year. Sony’s American Depositary Receipts fell 28 cents to $23.36 and have increased 6.8 percent this year.
YouTube, mostly filled with user-generated content, is seeking agreements with film and television studios to add clips of professionally produced programs.
“They want to move out of their Webcam scenario and more into the Web TV category,” Owyang said. “The more content they can index, the better.”
CBS Corp., controlled by Sumner Redstone, puts clips and full television episodes from its broadcast network and from the Showtime cable channel on YouTube. Walt Disney Co., based in Burbank, California, last week agreed to put ABC and ESPN clips on YouTube.
Mainstream advertisers prefer professionally produced content to home video. YouTube shares revenue from advertisements that appear alongside those clips.
Viacom Inc., also controlled by Redstone, is suing Google for allegedly not removing copyrighted material from YouTube that users posted from the company’s Comedy Central and MTV cable channels and its Paramount film studio.
Sony, based in Tokyo, and the world’s second-largest consumer-electronics manufacturer, acquired Crackle, then a video-sharing Web site called Grouper, in August 2006 for $65 million.
|