Archive notice: This article was originally published on August 30, 2010. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
According to the Financial Times, Google is in negotiations with several leading Hollywood studios and plans to launch a pay-per-view service for feature films in cooperation with them. A provisional price of around 5 US dollars per film is being targeted.
The advantage for the studios – compared, for example, with working with Apple – would be a state-of-the-art streaming platform available worldwide and excellently connected through Google Search.
With DVD sales declining, the studios are looking for alternative sources of income, and since Hulu and Netflix, two of the largest providers of films over the internet, indicated a negotiating range of up to two billion dollars, the market will probably soon split between on-demand services and the cinema screen, while DVDs will only be used for archival purposes.
