The ever popular YouTube website, owned by Google are in talks with Hollywood movie studios to launch a worldwide pay per view video service at the end of 2010 to challenge Apple's dominance for online digital video distribution.

Google have been hard pitching to studios on the appeal of streaming on demand movies to their massive audience. Google are thinking of using their search technology with Youtube to direct viewers to the new service which would certainly launch first in the USA, with a rolled out expansion across the globe.

“Google and YouTube are a global phenomenon with a hell of a lot of eyeballs – more than any cable or satellite service,” said an inside executive. “They’ve talked about how many people they could steer to this . . . it’s a huge number.”

Apple this week are announcing plans to its TV device which connects a living room TV to the internet. The competition is heating up, and if Google throw enough resources, they are clearly capable of attracting a massive worldwide audience to this platform. Millions of people use YouTube each day already, so it seems like a logical next step.

While it may seem a big step for Hollywood, this project has already stirred up plenty of interest as the sales of DVDs is dropping steadily each month and BluRay is still a relatively smallish worldwide audience for recouping movie costs.

One of the major issues could be pirated copies of the films, but with streaming rather than direct download it may prove slightly more difficult to create illegal copies of the content than expected. While no amounts have been officially quoted, industry insiders are quoting $5 fees for new titles.

KitGuru says: Do you feel this would work or is Youtube primarily a ‘free' user generated content platform?

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