YouTube to Rent Paramount Movies

In a new deal, YouTube will be renting flicks produced by Paramount Pictures. Paramount will make available 500 movies, including Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Transformers, and The Godfather trilogy, reports Bloomberg Business Week. The titles will be online in a few weeks and cost $2.99 to $3.99 for a 48-hour rental.

YouTube already provides content from four other major studios. “It’s still early days for us,” says YouTube's director of content partnerships. “We’ll continue adding new titles and expanding our service to more countries this year.” Paramount Pictures is a subsidiary of Viacom, the conglomerate that sued YouTube in 2007 over copyrights. This deal may symbolize a burying of the hatchet between the two media companies, writes Brian Womack. (More YouTube stories.)