New tube
On 22 January, Google-owned YouTube announced it was going to try something new: video rentals. Specifically this involved making five independent movies from the Sundance Film Festival available for rent at $3.99 a pop. Appropriately, it also produced a video about it, which you can see below.
In a recent interview with the NY Times, YouTube revealed that the experiment brought in about $10,000 - a modest start. YouTube spokesman Chris Dale spoke to the NYT and his spin was that it wasn't a bad effort seeing as not many people would have seen those movies anyway.
"It definitely exceeded our expectations given all the barriers," he said "The odds are always stacked against independent film makers, this allowed them to reach a bigger audience." It looks like YouTube plans to continue the experiment, but that it will be restricted to relatively niche video markets for the time being.
Contrastingly, YouTube released another video earlier this week that already has 600,000 views. It was the product of another experiment - this time called Citizen Tube - in which YouTube users were asked to submit questions to US president Barack Obama, for him to answer in front of the TV cameras. You can see the result of that below too, but be warned, it's over half an hour long.
