Google has revealed that they are working on bringing movie rentals on YouTube to the Indian market.

This means that we might soon be able to rent movies and other video content from YouTube here in India.

YouTube already offer this service (along with buying option) in a bunch of countries already.

Google India said:

Our pay-per-view services or ‘rental’ model is a natural step here in India for the partners that we are working with. For instance, Eros Entertainment who has been with us for a long time already has a lot of content up on YouTube. Once we have the functionality in, it will be done. There are many Indian media companies which are interested.

YouTube India already is home to tons of legal movies which are available for free streaming. These movies comes with advertising. Rental support would ensure that users would get access to even more content (and recent releases) and hopefully without the ads.

There are two big problems with this platform here in India. First one is of course the payment mechanism. Credit cards are not very popular in the Indian market so Google would probably have to offer multiple payment options. They can collaborate with major ISPs in the country for carrier billing support for example. Second problem is of course that of high cost of bandwidth. Google can again partner with ISPs to offer free streaming of rented movies.

Whether they are able to come up with these solutions is something we can only wait to see!