YouTube Expands Video Rental Program
Last month, YouTube rolled out a new rental service that allowed users to rent independent films from the Sundance film festival. But now, despite weak demand for those films, YouTube has quietly expanded the video rental program with a number of niche content providers.
YouTube’s rental offering started with five independent movies that had been featured at Sundance over the last two years. Those movies, which include the 2009 Sundance Audience Winner The Cove, cost $3.99 each for a 48-hour viewing window. But neither YouTube nor the independent filmmakers involved made a lot of money from the offering. According to the NY Times, those films received a combined 2,684 views by the time the promotion ended, netting YouTube just $10,709.16 in rentals.
While YouTube hasn’t publicized the expansion of its rental program (and has not returned calls for comment), a quick search for participating content providers reveals a number of video publishers in niche verticals that have signed up to take part in it. The rental program, which is currently in beta, has content from a number of anime, fitness and travel video distributors, among others. The price of the rentals and the length of the viewing windows appears to differ by publisher, suggesting that they’re the ones who set the price and length of time during which viewers can watch those videos.
Publishers that have videos for rent include: Anime Network, Bay View Fitness, Cerebellum Corp, FineCooking, FineWoodworking.com, FitnessChannel, FUNimation Entertainment, GolfLink.com, Language Tree, Questar Entertainment, Terwilliger Productions, TravelVideoStore.com and UFOTV Studios.
Despite the growing number of content providers that have begun renting videos through the program, it’s still in its infancy. FUNimation Entertainment, one of the companies participating, has made about 100 videos available through the rental program over the first month, according to Mario Rodriguez, brand manager for the anime video distribution company. But he expects that number to expand as YouTube throws more weight behind video rentals. “We’re fully invested in it,” Rodriguez said in a phone interview. “We will grow it as it grows.”
It will be interesting to see how the rental program fares as YouTube targets specific verticals with built-in viewership. As opposed to the more general audience for independent films, anime video distributors like FUNimation and Anime Network have pretty rabid fans. But whether those fans will be willing to pay for anime shows on YouTube, for a limited window of time, is still unclear.
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Cool, I honestly never thought of YouTube as a rental medium, but thinking about it makes perfect sense.
This is a smart move on the part of Youtube. They are testing with some of the smaller content producers in order to refine their offering and figure out how to provide the rental service in a compelling way, and will eventually shift to an offering with a deep library of titles assuming they can generate some success with the model. It will take some time to build this business. One should be careful of calling it a success or failure based on the very low number of rentals that took place on the sundance titles that were offered. The real test will come when Youtube offers the rental service for titles that generate millions of dollars in box office revenue. My guess is that for those titles, youtube will generate at least hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars for the producers of those titles assuming some promotion of the offering of the site. This will potentially be a significant business for Youtube and am looking forward to watching it develop.
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