After yesterdays announcement of the new Android Market being launched and Netflix changing prices, it got me to thinking. Whatever happened to movies on YouTube? So I grabbed my Logitech Revue keyboard and navigated to the YouTube app. On the right hand side was a list of newly released movies. I clicked and started looking through the list. I was surprised to see many titles that are yet to be available on Netflix Streaming. Many newer titles and many older titles that Netflix only offers through DVD or Blu-Ray. Since none of us really want to pay the new pricing fee for DVDs-by-mail, I thought this might be a nice reminder of something we take for granted.
To take it one step further I thought I’d check it out on my phone. Sadly the YouTube app doesn’t support movies on the mobile platform. Which kinda got me wondering why Google never made that possible. Was it due to the future plans of Movies on the market? That could be the reason. If we take a look at how well that is shaping up for rooted devices, I feel a little left out. Near as I could tell, all the same movies are available on the market that are available on YouTube. That makes sense since Google owns YouTube. After looking through the available movies on the Market I couldn’t find a single FREE one to watch. Why not? They own the rights to digitally distribute the movies, why not include the FREE titles you can watch via YouTube?
So why not enable movies on the YouTube mobile app? Wouldn’t this solve their fears of pirating movies from the market? I am sure there is a way to download the YouTube movie with various applications that are in the market, but how many people really would use that as an option. Most of us know other ways to get our hands on a movie we want to watch no matter how many policies are put into place. I wonder if Google will ever address this as a potential service to offer to it’s mobile users. Sure, there are 15 second adds every 20 minutes or so, but does that really matter? It’s a free movie, I can deal with that. Just a few things to think about.
As the title would lead you to believe, I came up with a work around last night to be able to watch those free movies on my phone. I assume this should work on any device as long as you have flash player support or a browser that offers flash support. Which is memory serves me correctly, Skyfire browser offers this capability and they offer a License Key to get the best optimization.
There are various ways you can go about watching YouTube Movies. I use Dolphin as my primary browser. I also have the browser set to Desktop view by default so I see pages like I would on my PC. That can be found under MENU > MORE > SETTINGS > USER AGENT > Desktop. Here is where you have 2 choices. You can navigate the browser to YouTube.com and Look through and find movies and hit play. Tap full screen and rotate your device. All set. Your second option, and the one I personally like much better. Spend a few minutes on your PC looking for the movies you wish to watch. Copy the links to an email and send them to yourself. I created a new folder called “Movies” and move the email(s) to it for easy finding in the future. Then when I want to watch a movie I simply open that folder, find the movie I want and launch my browser.
For instance, http://www.youtube.com/movie/men-in-black takes you to the YouTube page to click the “Watch Now” button.
Hope this was helpful and please let us know any other tips or tricks you might have for anything. You can email me directly at stormybeach@androidstory.com.
