I had one of those “I should have brought the camera!” moments yesterday afternoon. I pulled into the parking lot of my neighborhood post office and saw a UPS (United Parcel Service) truck parked there. Then I watched as the driver unloaded two rather large packages, put them on his dolly and then rolled them on inside. He went to the door leading to the offices of the branch, knocked on the door and then delivered them.
I asked the window clerk about it and he said that both UPS and FedEx deliver there regularly. Something just doesn’t look right here. The world is upside down. Next thing you know, they’ll be ordering adding machine ribbon.
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There was an announcement by YouTube yesterday that they’ve come to an agreement with MGM to post some movie trailers and promotions along with a very limited number of full-length feature films on the YouTube site.
If you’ve ever uploaded videos to YouTube, you know that in most cases they hold you to a limit of 10 minutes elapsed time for the content. For a long time, though, they’ve permitted arrangements with accepted independent, professional videographers to post lengthier videos. But this is their first foray into full-length movies. It looks like the major studios are accepting the inevitable and learning to “love the bomb,” so to speak.
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No doubt, this is just a toe-dip into the water for both YouTube and MGM to smooth out the process and see what it will take to make the system work. More and more, people are connecting their computers directly to their tv monitors, so this will have the potential to offer a direct competition to the cable tv movie channels. It will also have the added benefit of allowing the viewer to pick out whatever time they want to watch the movie, as opposed to waiting for TCM to run the show you want to watch.
And it will certainly drive another nail into the Blockbuster-style rental stores’ coffin. (Man, I’m full of stale cliches this morning. I have to apologize.) The streaming will be free to watch, but the trade-off will be the placement of advertising throughout the movie a la television programming. And you can’t fast-forward it, either.
One thing I’m wondering about is if they will make any attempt to prevent you from downloading the entire movie onto your hard drive where you could then snip out the ads and then just burn your own DVD copy of the film. There are already many free downloadable programs that will snatch and save a YouTube video for your hard drive. Inquiring minds want to know.
We’ll wonder some more about that later. Right now we have to get the equipment checked for the day. And I really need to get the coffee pot going. See you back in the day room.
