Google announced today that they will start offering movie rentals at their popular video portal Youtube. The five initial movies from the 2009 and 2010 Sundance Film Festival will be available from Friday on for US Youtube users with additional movies from partners being offered in the following weeks.
The limitations of the movie rentals at Youtube make it likely that this is a live test of the technology used to provide those video rentals with the likelihood that the service will be expanded and optimized later this year.
But it is not just the limited amount of movies that are offered for rental that are worrying Youtube users. More pressing than that is the fact that only US users will be able to rent those movies for a – premium – of $3.99 per movie providing that they have access to a Google Checkout account.
There is also chatter in the blogosphere that Google has plans to extend the movie rental plans to live TV plans as well so that users – we again assume that there will be country restrictions – can watch live events, including live sports events, on Youtube after paying for that event with the possibility that subscription based plans are introduced as well.
It is not clear yet how the movie rentals are protected from being watched by Youtube users who have not paid for them. It is likely that Google will require users to have a Youtube account that the rented movies will be linked to.
It remains to be seen if other forms of protection – read DRM – will be implemented by Google to protect the movies from being downloaded. Google will make another announcement tomorrow that will contain more details about the Youtube movie rentals process.
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