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.