YouTube has opened an online film rental store in the US, after it trialled the service in January. The Google-owned company is charging 99 cents to $3.99 a pop for its range of film rentals. YouTube gives customers between 24 and 72 hours to rent a movie from its store (US only). The ad broker tentatively tested out the …

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Friday 23rd April 2010 13:30 GMT MrGutts

Needs work

Wow the site really needs work, they have a lot to learn about movie rentals over digital distribution. They don't even have a place for new movies and you can't filter anything on the site.

I wonder is viewing the movies just as bad as the regular Youtube experience or do you think they made a separate server farm and bandwidth allocation for this over priced service.

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Friday 23rd April 2010 13:35 GMT Dick Emery

Buffering...

...jerk jerk...oops! Flash crashed the browser.

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1. Friday 23rd April 2010 13:59 GMT Mike Flugennock
  
  You're reading my mind, man...
  
  Seriously, do they honestly expect me to _pay_ to watch films in that crappy little window on the screen, pausing to re-buffer every 45 seconds, full of nasty, crunchy compression artifacts?
  
  Uh huh. Yeah, right.
  
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2. Friday 23rd April 2010 21:30 GMT Squirrel
  
  html5
  
  html5 mode?
  
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Friday 23rd April 2010 13:38 GMT Anonymous Coward

That's a win

People are happy to pay for stuff, if it is a reasonable price and terms.

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Friday 23rd April 2010 14:53 GMT Tom 13

They don't have to beat, only compete.

People want choices, not sole sources. They also want it to look decent. Haven't looked so I can't comment on that part.

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Friday 23rd April 2010 17:28 GMT Mark McGuire

Keep it Separate Stoopid

Youtube is synonymous with crappy webcam videos, overused memes and, for the most part, unintelligent uploads. I'd much rather have any rentals be separate from youtube, so that after I rent a movie I'm not recommended a video featuring cats. It's a nice move, but... keep it separate from the entirety of youtube.

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Friday 23rd April 2010 21:30 GMT Doc_Strangelove

Is YouTube TV 2.0 ?

"While appearing before a congressional subcommittee, Chad Hurley, CEO of YouTube, denied that the company was intent on competing with television (p. 170)."

Quoted in Watching YouTube: Extraordinary Videos by Ordinary People (University of Toronto Press, 2010)

Dr. Strangelove

University of Ottawa

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Friday 23rd April 2010 21:37 GMT bex

player

Not that it is any good for me but I hope that they are not using the flash player for this or it will be pointless on OS X at anything like a decent resolution

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Monday 26th April 2010 13:16 GMT Adam 10

Sound quality

Virgin On-Demand, iPlayer and 4OD showed the world that high-quality VOD can be achieved over regular home broadband connections, and YouTube now has various HD options that give much better video quality than a lot of the webcammed, downloaded, reuploaded, redownloaded, ripped off and then reposted videos that are so often seen on YouTube.

Most people geeky enough to watch movies over the internet through a PC will have some form of surround-sound system now, and a Dolby Digital 5.1 stream would be more than possible alongside HD video.

So, what about it Google?

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