YouTube Movie & TV Show Rentals Available Starting at $0.99 [YouTube Quietly Starts Movie & TV Show Rentals Program; Google to Rival iTunes, Netflix, Hulu TiVo & More?]

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I can’t say I wasn’t expecting Google to offer full movies and TV shows on YouTube sooner or later. After all, even Hulu decided to pitch paid subscriptions to its faithful customers so why shouldn’t YouTube do the same since this popular video sharing website is already receiving tons of traffic.

And it looks like Google did just that as it’s now offering full movie and TV shows on YouTube with pricing starting at just $0.99 and going all the way up to $3.99. Payment is done thorough Google Check out and you can view your rented shows for 48 hours after payment. Google started testing the service back in January but now it’s ready for the next level.

For now you can only select Independent, Bollywood, Manga and documentaries from the YouTube store, but we can only expect YouTube to offer more and more titles in the near future as it certainly has what it takes to fight against Apple’s iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, TiVo and other video-on-demand services.

I have one more reason when saying that YouTube will probably grow even more and offer all the hot new movies and TV series: the tablet business. The tablet has been successfully remarketed by Apple this year and presented to the world as a device that’s only useful if its creators are ready to offer lots of content for it.

We already know that a few Android-based tablets are scheduled to arrive later this year, one of them being Google’s own creation. With that in mind we can only imagine that Google will want to offer its customers and partners a similar environment to iTunes. An Android tablet will have access to the Marketplace for apps but will also require lots of eBooks and video downloads.

So while you might not be interested in the current titles available in the YouTube store, make sure you bookmark it for later. Who knows when you’ll actually be interested in what it has to offer?