Google Finally Enters The Multimedia Game With Movies And Music

As we’ve talked about before, Google’s does not exactly have expertise in the multimedia area. Movies or music, Google has lagged behind the competition. Well, today is the day that starts to change. The rumors of YouTube movie rentals was apparently just the beginning of Google’s new Movies service. It’s largely standard fare, $2-4 movie rentals with limited access. You’ll have a 30-day period to start watching, and 24 hours after you start watching to finish it. Which means if you hurry, you might finish a Peter Jackson movie.

One cool new feature, though, that actually looks rather cool, is what Google calls “pinning” a movie to a device. Start pinning a movie you’ve rented to your phone or tablet and it will begin downloading the movie in the background. This way, you can continue to watch your rented movie even if you lose your data connection. Handy for airplanes, rural areas, and those of you on AT&T. (Yuk, yuk,yuk.)

On the music side of things, it looks like the rumors of Google’s music labels talks falling through were at least somewhat accurate as Google’s Music service seems to lack any form of subscription or purchasing options. However, much like Amazon’s cloud service allows you to upload your collection to the cloud, Google will let you store your music on their servers and stream to any Android device you own. Much unlike Amazon’s service, Google will let you store 20,000 songs, which is a far cry from the 5GB Amazon offers. No word yet on just how much more, but suffice to say you’ll have plenty of space. It’s small comfort to those who want to add any music to their collection with Google’s service, but still a comfort.

Android 3.1, which will bring the new Movies app, will be available to Verizon Xoom users today, and the new Music app in the Android Market for users running 2.2 and up.

Source: Google I/O