Updated 5:48 p.m.: Adding details about the new movie rentals and correcting the spelling of Salar Kamangar, the head of YouTube’s, last name.
YouTube on Monday confirmed reports that it will expand its online streaming movie rental service.
YouTube will double its movie rental catalog by adding 3,000 movies to the service. The movies are, for the first time, from big-name studios like Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Pictures and Warner Brothers and include recent releases like “Inception,” “The King’s Speech” and “Little Fockers.”
New releases will rent for $3.99 and others for $2.99. Viewers will generally have 30 days to begin watching a movie and 24 hours to complete it once they start watching it.
Last month, publications including The New York Times, reported that Sony, Universal and Warner Brothers had agreed to rent movies on the site.
The expansion of the rental business is a big step toward a new revenue stream for YouTube — in addition to the ads it shows next to short video clips uploaded to the site — as Google focuses on making YouTube profitable. It is also YouTube’s latest effort to mature from just showing amusing home video clips to a site that offers professional content as it competes with services like Netflix, iTunes and Amazon.com for viewers and advertisers.
Perhaps as a way to court the studios, YouTube said it would also add marketing videos for movies, like free trailers, interviews with actors and behind-the-scenes clips.
In addition to courting the big movie studios, YouTube has also been nurturing video creators and bought a company, Next New Networks, to help it mentor small video creators and build their audiences.
“YouTube isn’t about one type of device or one type of video,” Salar Kamangar, head of YouTube, wrote in a company blog post.
“But you’re spending just 15 minutes a day on YouTube, and spending five hours a day watching TV,” he wrote. “As the lines between online and offline continue to blur, we think that’s going to change.”