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.

This is apparently not working and I figured that Apple would be really lame if they would fall for this and rely only on the renters system date. A simple comparison between the date that the movie was rented (on iTunes) and the computer would be sufficient to stop the trick.

I’m not sure how they check the date if you transfer the movie to your iPod or iPhone because these do not have a permanent Internet connection. So, it must be some sort of local check and it’s probably easier to hack it on these devices. It will be only a matter of time I guess until someone creates a software that removes the DRM from the movies so that they can be watched indefinitely.

I was never such a big fan of online movie rentals in first place, mainly because I do not like to watch movies on the computer. I do not watch lots of TV, maybe 2 hours a week, but I do like to watch movies on the TV and not on the computer. Might be ok if you are alone but I tend to watch movies with friends because it’s more fun and that is not really nice if you use the computer monitor to watch it.