Google bags fifth of the six major movie studios

Google Play scrambles to compete against Amazon, Apple in the digital rental market

Google's online movie playlist is getting substantially more robust now that the service is signing on Paramount Pictures licensed products. Despite the ongoing lawsuit between Google and Paramount Pictures' parent company Viacom, Google Play will add some 500 new titles of movies as of Wednesday morning.

Movies in this new deal will include "Hugo," “Transformers,” "Captain America," and the “The Godfather.”

This announcement connects Google with five of the six big studios: Paramount, Time Warner’s Warner Bros., Disney, Sony, and Comcast’s Universal.

The single outlier is 20th Century Fox, which is owned by News Corp. While, currently all six Hollywood studios rent their movies via Apple’s iTunes. 

Malik Ducard, director of content partnerships for YouTube, explained in a statement that the rentals will be available only to fans in the United States and Canada, and while many of the movies are available upon the announcement, more will be added in the coming months.

This expanded catalog partnership with Paramount Pictures might help Google fight head-to-head with Amazon and Apple's online sale and rental business.

Rentals for the new movies will be priced the same as other rentals on Google Play: $3.99 for new releases and $2.99 for most older movies, with a $1 premium if you want HD content -- and most titles will be available to view for the 48 hours following the transaction.

Google has had to do a lot of sweet-talking and scrounging to even start competing with Apple and Amazon since each have built a strong usership in online content and apps from their tablet markets while Google remains to make a fraction of what the other two are on online digital content purchases.

We reported last week that Amazon is far outpacing Google in the mobile market and has got the iTunes App Store in its sites.

The Amazon App Store revenue is roughly 89% of iTunes App Store revenue as of February 2012, according to new data announced by mobile analytics firm Flurry on Friday.

This puts Google Play, formerly known as the Google Android Market, in the precarious third place spot with only 23% of the revenue coming to the App Store. Amazon has made amazing progress, a lot thanks to its Amazon Fire device that was selling like gangbusters over the holiday season. Amazon has also been known to vet for quality apps, run promotions and market to everyone with an Amazon account.

When we compare these results to the study that Flurry published in its December report, we see that Google has held steady at 23 cents of revenue for every dollar going to iTunes (Amazon was not a part of the previous study.)

Earlier this month, Apple crossed a record 25 billion downloads from more than 550,000 available apps and Google announced in December 2011 that it had crossed 10 billion downloads from 400,000 available apps.

With Amazon already delivering more than three times the revenue in its app store compared to what Google generates,  we may see a larger clamoring of developers to get onto the Amazon store.  

This app store finding comes on the heels of Amazon announcing its desire to beef up its video catalog by 3,000 by closing a licensing deal with Discovery Communications. 

This was the biggest single addition to the Amazon Prime list of streaming videos including programs from Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet, Investigation Discovery and the Science and Military Channel. This means that Amazon Prime customers will now be able to stream TV episodes and specials from those channels, as well as from the company’s 25-year programming library.

Popular programs included in this agreement are: Discovery Channel’s “Dirty Jobs,” TLC’s “Say Yes To The Dress” and Animal Planet’s “Whale Wars,” “Cake Boss,” “Mythbusters” and the deeply beloved program series turned near-calendar-holiday “Shark Week.”

Amazon Prime customers pay the $79 per year for the service, which also includes free two-day shipping and access to the Kindle Lending Library.

Amazon now hosts more than 17,000 titles for streaming, and 120,000+ movies for rent or purchase through Amazon Instant Video. 

Last month Amazon signed a similar deal with Viacom and had continued to grow its catalog since DEcember when the videos available were just 13,000.

Amazon Prime has been getting some serious push through the marketing of the Kindle Fire tablet, which has helped boost membership north of 3 million.

While the boost in Amazon Prime offerings is a great addition, the company still has some stiff competition to deal with as Netflix continues to hold a lion's share of the market and video hosting services like YouTube are flooding money into the creation of original content and grabbing up music licensing agreements with VEVO. 

Prime Instant Videos are viewable on the Kindle Fire, Mac, PC, or Roku and as well as select blu-ray players.

So just as Amazon has gone after the tablet market and the streaming video market, the online retailer is quickly becoming the biggest competitor on the mobile application market too.