500 Paramount Films Coming to YouTube

You’ll soon be able to rent nearly 500 Paramount Pictures films via YouTube and Google Play, thanks to a newly signed licensing agreement between the two companies.

Many of those films, including The Godfather trilogy, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Hugo, are now available to Internet users in the U.S. and Canada. Others will be rolled out over the next few months, says Google.

Forty-eight hour rentals cost between $2.99 and $3.99 for the standard-definition version, and a dollar more for the HD (720p) edition. You have 30 days from the time of purchase to begin watching a movie, and 48 hours from the time you begin to finish watching it.

Viacom-owned Paramount was one of the last big “gets” for the tech giant’s movie rental service: five of the six major film studios, along with ten independent studios, have now agreed to rent films through YouTube and Google Play, bringing the total rental catalog to 9,000. The last holdout? 20th Century Fox, which is owned by News Corp. All six studios — Paramount, Disney, Sony, Warner Bros., Comcast Universal and 20th Century Fox — sell films through Apple’s iTunes service.

There’s still no word about whether Google will begin selling as well as renting films, as Apple does. Rumors indicate that studios are pressuring Google to begin selling films to help make up for declines in DVD sales.