Spotify continues to negotiate with Facebook over its long promised U.S. launch. But that isn’t the only thing the music streaming service has been up to. They’ve negotiated a number of deals with major movie studios to offer users streaming movies as well as music, a source in the industry tells us.
Earlier this week we reported that YouTube plans a similar service (something we first wrote about last year). As with Google/YouTube, we’re not sure when Spotify will launch the new service. But our best information suggests this Fall.
And these aren’t your standard Netflix/Amazon/iTunes type movie deals, either, we’ve heard. Spotify is aiming to offer users much earlier access to movies. Similar to the release dates that hotel’s get for premium in-room movies. They’re expensive, but users can often see them just a couple of weeks after they’ve been in theaters.
We believe the studio deals being negotiated are for worldwide rights, so Spotify users anywhere would have access.
Update: CEO Daniel Ek says this story isn’t accurate: “No it ain’t true. Media these days are funny. Soon I’ll be reading that Spotify is launching a space rocket.” Since he’s said that in the past about a number of our stories, all of which turned out to be accurate, we’re going to wait and see.
Spotify has created a lightweight software application that allows instant listening to specific tracks or albums with virtually no buffering delay. It was launched in the fall of 2008 and had approximately 10 million users by September 2010. Spotify offers streaming music from major and independent record labels including Sony, EMI, Warner Music Group, and Universal. Users download Spotify and then log onto their service enabling the on-demand streaming of music. Music can be browsed by artist, album, record...
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Berlin, Germany
San Francisco
San Francisco, CA
