Free movies on Youtube on Android

Question

When I use Youtube on my computer, they have a stack of older movies available for free, in the Movie section. (Ghostbusters for example! Who ya gonna call?)

To be clear, they still had the rentals, but they had a way to filter or search for free ones as well.

When using the Youtube app on my Android 3.2.1 ASUS Eee Transformer tablet, I cannot find this manner of filtering Youtube in the Youtube app.

Is this a limitation?

Answer 1

I do see what you are talking about. In my YouTube app (ICS version) I can see several categories under "Browse", where it seems movies would fit in, but this category is non-existent. I do know that there are many videos on YouTube that are "Not available for viewing on mobile devices", and I think this is what's happening in this case.

For example, "Talladega Nights" is currently available under the YouTube movie section, but cannot be found in doing a search on the mobile app.

It looks like this is a desktop only feature for now :/

Answer 2

It appears that the "view free movies only" functionality has not been added to either the youtube app nor the mobile version of the site.

Presumably this will be added at some future date, but until then, a workaround (which works for me in Canada, at least from brief testing (I was able to open and start watching Final Fantasy : The Spirits within)) would be to do the following:

1. Open youtube.com/movies in your device browser.
2. Hit the "desktop" link at the bottom-left.
3. Open the free section as normal and find the movie you want.
4. When you hit the watch now button, select to open in the youtube app rather than in browser.

If at some point in those steps it just jumps on its own to the youtube app, you'll need to go into settings->applications->youtube and clear the "launch by default" setting for the app.

Answer 3

The Youtube app does not provide these free movies. I believe the only movies Google provides is in their Play Store; obvious not free options.