Movie rental page on YouTube | Hacker News Reader

Movie rental page on YouTube

youtube.com

68 pointsanigbrowl54 comments

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"This video is not available in your country.

Sorry about that."

No problem. The Pirate Bay is still available in my country.

Now, I'm surprised. My country is supposed to be the one that has to always encounter, "Not available in your Country."

But these movies are available in Indian Rupee and they're cheap. ₹100 ($1.63) for Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

I'm India. :-)

Captain America is listed at AU$19.99 here (US$18.56)...

It's not clear whether you're "buying" or "renting" at that price on the index. If I click on a buy button, it gives me a message about a Google+ account page and won't let me proceed. Google's account arrangement is absolutely terrible.

Clicking on Captain America (in the UK) led to a video preview which says 'buy' rather than 'rent', which is strange as Youtube seems like it'd be better suited to a rental market.

I remember reading somewhere that the decision as to what's available for rent vs purchase is made by each movie's production company. I can't find where I read that now so I could be wrong or maybe someone who knows more could pop in.

It's been one singular account across their entire system for well over a year now. C'mon.

I get an error stating that I can't use my Youtube account, I have to use my Gmail account. When I do that, it automatically creates another Youtube account for me.

Or something like that. I've given up on understanding their accounts logic, it's hard enough to keep up with the changes to the player and site.

You can link your old youtube account to your gmail account.

Yes, that's why I now have approximately 4 youtube accounts.

I still have...

1) My university Google Apps account, with which I cannot use most services. 2) My employer's Google Apps, fully functional but will be dead at the end of the summer. 3) My personal GMail account.

And now you can switch between all of them on the fly easily, and anytime you're logging in on one or could be using Google's OAuth it provides a page to select which ID you'd like to use.

It's more confusing than that in my experience. I have to use incognito windows to stay signed into my calendar, Google Apps for Business email, Analytics, AdSense, etc without confusing it. Otherwise it will sign me out of my email regularly.

When I tried to find out the details of that video, it said I couldn't do it with the Google account I was using and to switch to a different account (and it knew what that account was).

Things seem to be more expensive than amazon, and then of course even more account fuckery from Google:

    > Purchases are not available
    >
    > Channels linked with a Google+ page, such as codemac, can't make purchases on YouTube.
    >
    > To watch this video, you'll need to switch to your codemac@gmail.com account.

I'm not even sure what that means.

Semi-seriously, knowing G+, part of me wouldn't be surprised if there was a list of real people's names publicly available somewhere indicating who bought what movie.

G+ no longer requires a real name. They still recommend using your "real name" (whatever that is), but you can use whatever you like now.

Which is one of the few things that the US actually has privacy laws against: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act

'This video is unavailable in your country'. As long as that happens, things like PopcornTime or any other human approachable piracy will continue to exist. Hopefully, the mentioned PopcornTime will 'disrupt the market' enough for the people to understand that the problem isnt in the fact wether I want to pay for the content or not, because I want to, for a long, long time now, but in the fact that I want it now, not tomorrow, not in a month, not when I am in the blessed land of this or another country...

I would love to use this, but in Spain it only offers films overdubbed into Spanish and no subtitles.

Blame the film distributors. Google can only sell what they receive from whoever owns the right in that region.

My browser is in English, and so are all my Google/YouTube settings, yet the movies are also dubbed in another language based on my current IP address. YouTube should respect my language setting.

Please Google, fix this. In Switzerland we have 3 main languages over a very small territory. Some Google services respond with content randomly in German, Italian or French, sometimes even mixed (ex: Playstore shows different language for titles than descriptions. Youtube loves to show me German videos ... ).

I'd be very interested on why they choose to guess the language based on IP. What could be the advantage ?

This is annoying to me in the US as well. I'm trying to stay fluent in my other language, and finding good non-English content on Amazon, iTunes, Netflix, Spotify, etc is close to impossible. No matter what my language is set to.

$12.99 to rent a digital movie? As we say here in New Zealand, "Yeah, nah." Considering most people here also have capped data, we'd essentially be paying twice.

It's probably to buy. The way they're presenting pricing is horrible.

I'm not sure how the US pricing compares, but CAD rental and purchase prices seem a bit higher than iTunes Store ($1 more per rental and $5 more for a sale).

$20 to rent the Amazing Spiderman 2? Are you fucking daft? It's not worth $20 for the blu-ray or god forbid a DRM free download.

What a farce.

It's probably only available "to own", not to rent.

To own until the studio pulls it ಠ_ಠ. https://torrentfreak.com/amazon-pulls-access-to-purchased-ch...

€7,99 for a movie rental? right...

This feature is several years old, IIRC?

Some of these movies seem quite new. Snowpiercer is still in theaters I believe.

Snowpiercer has been widely released already. it's one of those movies that struggled to find distribution and went to DVD and streaming before it hit most theatres. it's been on available on torrents for almost half a year now.

Yeah, it's been active since at least last spring in the current form. I assumed it had already been discussed here but to my surprise it had not.

Probably a precursor to Play Store Movies: https://play.google.com/store/movies

Pretty sure Play Store Movies just use Youtube for Browser streaming, so it's all the same system just different frontends for it.

I tried this about a year ago. Or at least some considerable time ago.

Next I'll be seeing a story about this newfangled 'Bitcoin'!

Here's a news article from 2011: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/oct/07/youtube-on...

Anyway, the movie I streamed worked well. Instant, and easy!

Purchasable movies have started showing up in search results lately (ex: search for 'shaun the sheep' or 'earnest and celeste'). That's fine, but it's rather disappointing (inconvenient?) that there doesn't appear to be a filter that limits the search to "free" content.

Haven't tried this yet, but I'm curious: will this work on stock Ubuntu Trusty Firefox or Chrome without having to go into ricer mode? Amazon rented movies don't work, Netflix doesn't work by default, have to resort to using the iPad. Yes yes pipelight, I know.

Yes, it works for me on Firefox on Ubuntu 14.04. This is just normal youtube page. No special plugins needed (except for flash, of course).

This is some patchwork page (/user/movies) and authors being the movie studios (/user/sonypictureshomeent). As somebody mentioned earlier, this is precursor to the Play Movies page. I'm not sure why it's still around.

I'm only being shown free and/or cheap movies. I guess there must be some sort of system in place that doesn't let me see whatever you are all talking about (Germany).

How do they implement the "rental" part, with some sort of DRM? Rental is a nonsensical practice for digital media really. Being bent on this idea leads these renting services to employ DRM. It's not only stupid, there is no real reason for applying the renting approach to begin with. Digital goods aren't limited like physical ones are, so there is no point in renting them out to get them back for reuse.

Simple pay / purchase approach works for digital goods the best, and that more naturally can remain DRM-free.

It has the "Buy" option there by the way. Is it DRM-free? Why can't they just make one option with lower price for "Buy"?

The movies are only streamable, so yeah completely DRM. Buy or rent. It's essentially just Google Play Movies.

Overdubbing is the worst. Original languages, please!

Get a Chromecast and it'll make sense.

Isn't this from Google Play movies?

Are there any ways to access Google Play rentals via LGTV Smart TV interface?

Top Selling: Dead Poets Society

): Nothing sadder than profiting off death.

It's a great and touching movie, and people thought they would watch it again. There are no hidden motives.

But when you realize that these moments are built into the profit model when deciding to fund films, it is a bit sad.

You seriously believe that when they made that movie they though, "we can allocate a little more to the budget because it'll get a bump when he dies in 25 years."???

I've actually been in that meeting where it was discussed about when someone would die. So I wouldn't be surprised. Either way, I can assure you it's part of the revenue forecast.

I could see that being true if it's an older actor (a legend in their 70s working on a movie guaranteed to be a hit) but he was in his 30's when that movie came out. Predicting that far in to the future would be stupid considering how much the entertainment industry has changed in the last 25 years (VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray, Digital, Streaming) and the fact that the production and distribution companies may not even be around anymore (I think in this case they are but that's a big prediction 25 years out). Also, if the internet hadn't come along the number of people rushing out to buy this on DVD would be much smaller. It's unlikely it would be in stock and by the time it was stocked people would have moved on.

So if you are factoring the actors death into your budget when creating the movie you're either a total idiot or willing to predict:

- An instant-seamless distribution system, aka the internet

- Your company will be around 25-50 years from now

- Robin Williams will become an immensely popular actor

- This movie will be so good lots of people will want to watch it in 25 years

Edit:

I can see this being more likely in the music industry as I think people are much more likely to go back and listen to an old album: they see an artist die, they think, "I used to love that band" and they buy the album. With movies, until the digital era arrived, I don't think people did that as much.

Pretty sure it just so happens to be one of the movies they've got available and people are buying it of their own accord.

How about willingly paying money to rent a movie because an actor dies and you want to watch something you loved said actor in?

By your logic, I'm just as guilty. I'm supply the demand, happily. That profit doesn't exist if I don't hand it over.

Your logic is wrong (worse than that in fact, it's anti-life). Taken to its proper conclusion, you could just about never watch a movie again, for there will almost always be something tragic or sensational occurring at any given time with someone in every movie. Robin Williams is in rehab and in the news? Oops, can't watch his movies. Jodie Foster comes out as gay? Oops, can't watch her movies until the headlines go away. Angelina Jolie adopts an African child, oops, can't watch her movies until the headlines clear, that would be giving the studios a profit off of something beautiful and that's wrong /s

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