It’s been half a year now since YouTubers have been able to watch Hollywood movies for free. Is it something that you have been using regularly? All that you need to contend with are commercials gaps. YouTube added full-length Hollywood movies in its Movies & Shows section and you can access these films in a special section called “Free to Watch.” Another thing that makes this interesting is the fact that these movies are all classics and blockbusters, movies such as Legally Blonde, The Terminator, Zookeeper, Rocky IV and many more. You will notice that below each movie title is the tag “Free with ads.”
Same as watching TV shows that include commercials, users need to view the ads to enjoy the free movie continuously.
Rohit Dhawan, YouTube’s product management director, said, “We saw this opportunity based on user demand, beyond just offering paid movies. Can we do ad-supported movies, free to the user?”
“It also presents a nice opportunity for advertisers,” he added.
Mr. Dhawan didn’t reveal the terms of YouTube’s deals with studios or the way how it splits the ad proceeds with them. YouTube supply ads to the movies from its common pool of advertising demand that routes throughout the platform to all its monthly active users that is over 1.9 million.
This kind of ad-supported video-on-demand market is very hot right now to companies like Tubi. Tubi is known to have a free app that is distributed on connected TV devices such as Roku and smart TVs. On the other hand, Walmart also owned an ad-supported TV and movie app called Vudu. Meanwhile, Amazon is on the process now of developing an ad-supported video-on-demand app, and this is according to the advertisers who know about this offering but agreed to speak anonymously.
“Ad-supported video is a huge market,” says Farhad Massoudi, CEO of Tubi.
He added, “There’s a lot of consumer traction, and I expect all the major companies will jump in at some point.”
“This is a huge business opportunity. Low-quality, low-production video is predominantly what’s available on the web, and advertisers have seen a lot of issues with that. They don’t want to be associated with that type of content,” he mentioned.
