YouTube Is Testing Movie Rentals Starting with Sundance Festival Flicks

YouTube is trying everything these days to bring revenue numbers up and movie rentals shouldn't come as any surprise to anyone. The site is now announcing that it will begin renting movies starting with a small trial run of five movies being featured in the famous indie Sundance Film Festival which gets underway next week. The movies will rent for around $5 a pop and will be available, only in the US, starting Friday and running until January 31.

"While YouTube has offered an easy and economical way for filmmakers -- as well as content creators of all kinds -- to instantaneously connect with fans around the world, many of them have told us that the ad-supported business model doesn't always meet their distribution and monetization needs. And so, we are excited today to announce our partnership with the Sundance Film Festival to make five films from the 2010 and 2009 festivals available for rent for U.S. users on YouTube," the site announced on the official blog.

YouTube has been looking for new ways to monetize the content on the site and start generating some serious revenue for quite a while now. Paid streams were one obvious option, one rumored before, but it's unclear how the users will react to the move.

This is why Google is taking it slow, starting off with just these five movies. If these prove successful, it should be a good sign for the program and the site is likely to make a more aggressive move after that. YouTube says this is only the first step and more movies and other type of videos are landing on the site in the coming weeks available for rent.

The site is also enticing more filmmakers to test the program and will run a "Filmmakers Wanted" campaign at the independent film festival next week. It's not clear how much Google gets out of the rental price. Some of the more technical aspects of the service, like how long the 'renting' period lasts or how many times can a user view a movie in that period, are also unknown.