While Netflix has been seen in the wild on Android devices, the last we’ve heard from Netflix itself was last November, when the company explained that digital rights management was holding back an Android version of the beloved streaming movie service.
If you’re a Google fan, this has left you largely lacking in the streaming movie world…until today. This morning on stage at the Google I/O developer conference, Google announced a streaming movie service of its own.
Previously, mSpot offered streaming movies on Android, but that was about it. (Surely, let us know if there were others in the comments below.) Now, Google has begun offering movies via the Android Market that are available to stream on both the tablet, the phone and the home computer. The announcement is actually the continuation of yesterday’s announcement that YouTube would begin offering 3,000 titles for rent.
According to the team at the Google press conference today, the movie rental feature available on the Android Market is powered by the same back-end as the YouTube rental service and offers the same listing of movies. As a matter of fact, if you rent a movie on YouTube, it is available on all of your Android and Honeycomb devices and vice versa.
Movie rentals start at $1.99 and, once rented, are available for 30 days. Once you have begun streaming a movie, you have 24 hours to complete your viewing. Warner Brothers, Sony Pictures and Universal Studios have all been rumored to be involved in the deal.
