Hollywood

Google is attending this year’s annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, but the movie-making industry is anything but excited about the Internet giant’s presence.

According to The New York Times’ blog, the dinner is a large Hollywood affair equipped with buffets, banquets, and after-parties, where entertainment stars, media moguls, and famed celebrities alike gather to party the night away and mingle with the country’s most powerful politicians.

Google’s Eric Schmidt is a fresh face on this year’s guest list, but many show business executives, still scorned by the defeated antipiracy legislation earlier this year, are perturbed that the executive chairman plans to appear.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based Company’s role in conquering the hotly-debated legislation, coupled with Schmidt’s co-hosted pre-event party with The Hollywood Reporter in Washington on April 27, is just salt on the wound for many media executives.

The Los Angeles Times even noted the party does not “go unnoticed in the community.”

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Citing the obligatory “people familiar with the matter”, the Wall Street Journal in a story this morning reports that Google is finalizing contracts for upcoming YouTube channels that will stream premium entertainment content on a regular basis. Google CEO Larry Page apparently wants to give people a good reason to tune into YouTube instead of television. Content owners are being “encouraged” to create schedules of programming much like traditional TV, the paper noted.

YouTube has requested some content for the channels within the next 60 days, according to one of these people, as it considers a launch in early 2012. YouTube, which media companies have long griped is too stingy cutting content deals, is paying from a few hundred thousand dollars to several million to content creators to create and curate videos for a channel, according to these people. Google recoups the original payment through ad revenue, and Google and the partner share ad revenue after that.

This could be viewed as part of Google’s broader push towards providing high-quality Hollywood entertainment on YouTube. The timely strategy ties nicely with the Google TV project, which is also about to be updated with a new software release soon. The Wall Street Journal first reported on Google’s plans to spend a hundred million dollars on premium YouTube content back in April. Google is reportedly in talks with Creative Artists Agency, William Morris Endeavor and International Creative Management over professionally produced programming on broad themes, including arts, fashion and sports.

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The YouTube team announced via a blog post that American users will be able to rent three thousand movie titles on the popular video sharing site, paying via the Google Checkout billing system. Like on iTunes, some releases will come with additional content such as movie reviews, extras and other goodies. The team also shared a couple of eyebrow-raising stats concerning service metrics.

We’re spending 15 minutes a day watching YouTube clips to the tune of two billion views a day. For comparison, average users spend five hours a day watching the old-school tube, but Google thinks “that’s going to change”. More impressive than this is the fact that YouTube is now available on 350 million devices.

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