YouTube expands free TV & movie offerings

By The Power Of YouTube!

YouTube is adding to their slate of free, streaming, apparently high-quality video offerings. Launched last night is the ‘Shows’ tab on the YouTube homepage, where you can search for free, long-form TV episodes and movies. Google Inc.’s YouTube has partnered up with some of the biggest names in entertainment, such as Sony, MGM, CBS, Lion’s Gate and Liberty Media to fill the site with content.

At this point, the service is limited to mostly older fare like Fantasy Island and I Dream Of Jeannie, but there seems to be a fairly broad selection of stuff to watch already. I’m not a huge Party Of Five fan, but I will totally sit down and watch classic He-Man cartoons or even good old Newsradio or Married… with Children episodes over my lunch break. There’s even a good selection of stuff from Discovery Network and National Geographic. YouTube promises more to come.

The shows are supported with hardcoded ad content and, I have to admit it kinda pissed me off, pop-ups. One show I watched got 30 seconds into the episode, when a pop-up banner scrolled from the bottom of the screen. I was then asked to tell them ‘Which of theses shapes is a Triangle?’, obviously content from one of the most annoying kind of Google-ad you see these days on the Net. Whatever. Click the ‘X’ button and it’s gone.

It’s great to see partnerships like this that get the broadcast-quality content from the original sources over the Net for free. Right now, the Show and Movie tabs are only available in the U.S., which will piss off the rest of the world until it’s offered everywhere. There’s nothing like learning English from watching episodes of Sex Wars and Alf. “Willy!”