Ted Hope On Why YouTube's Film Rental Business is Not Working

On February 8th, 2011, Ted Hope took a hard look at the dismal numbers from YouTube's online film rental experiment with 20 Weinstein Company's films (a fixed fee for 48 hours worth of streaming of one title). Ted Hope concluded that "even with the convenience of online rentals, there is not enough value in [a short term rental of a single film]... when for twice the rental amount [online customers] can have unlimited streaming for the month [of ALL the films available for streaming on Netflix]."

Here are some other perspectives on the YouTube film rental experience: Including a January 2010 article from The Telegraph announcing the initial launch of YouTube's rental business at the Sundance Film Festival 2010, a critical analysis in paidcontent.org from January 11th, 2011 after a year of failure, and a February 2nd, 2011 attempt to put a more favorable spin on YouTube's dismal film rental numbers that appeared in Venture Beat.

Close readers of this blog will remember that we wrote about YouTube's failure to excite interest in their rental model with ten Sundance Festival films almost exactly one year ago.