Caught this news first in my email, courtesy of Google. They are ditching Google Play Movies & TV and putting your library of purchased movies & TV shows, if you have any, under your YouTube account. I just checked and our half dozen or so movies are there already.
Yes, don’t worry, you aren’t losing any of your existing movies & TV shows. This is purely a reorganizational move. It isn’t like what Walmart did with Vudu (see: Fandango Buys Vudu from Walmart – What Does This Mean For Both Services?). In reality when Walmart went after Amazon with their Walmart+ service, they should have kept Vudu and competed more directly against Prime Video as an added feature for members, but that is just our opinion (see: Walmart Plus launches September 15, maybe they should have kept Vudu)
Does this mean Google Play is going away completely or is it being kept only for apps and games? The word “play” doesn’t really invoke movie watching, it sounds much more interactive and fits games better. You can’t buy movies and TV shows on Steam, so maybe that is the direction Google Play is headed competitively.
Google is no stranger to moving and shutting down its services. Just do a simple Google search and you’ll see how many services they’ve shut down over the years (Wikipedia maintains a Discontinued Google Services page). Again, this isn’t a complete shutdown, just reorganization of content from one service to another and Google Play will remain, only not for movies & TV. YouTube is more logically suited, especially since they have the YouTube TV streaming live TV service they are selling. Our guess is what this is about, to keep these services together and to not require their customers to app skip to watch movie and TV shows in their libraries.
Still, when I think of YouTube, it is user-created video content, podcasts and the like, not Hollywood movies and TV shows. You? Maybe this is my own hangup. Keep in mind we have our own YouTube channel for Just Left Theateer Movie Reviews — so we obviously support YouTube. If you haven’t subscribed, please do. Every movie we see in theater we record a video as we leave the theater — or as shortly thereafter as we can.
Feel free to speculate or share what you know in the comments below.
Movies, Movies, Movies 