On Friday, YouTube started a movie rental experiment involving five motion pictures from the 2009 and 2010 Sundance Film Festivals.  Now, although the trial run is several days away from being over, it's starting to look like the word "failure" will have to be applied.

Ryan Lawler took a look at how many views each of the Sundance videos had chalked up as of last night.  The totals were sad, with Bass Ackwards, Homewrecker, The Cove, Children of Invention, and One Too Many Mornings receiving 308, 308, 303, 301, and 250 views, respectively.

This indicates an almost extreme disinterest on the part of YouTube users; lots of random clips that haven't been mentioned on the YouTube Blog and in various places all over the Web attract more viewers.

There could be a few valid excuses for these numbers, however.  First is the simple idea of the view counters getting stuck, and of the five videos, YouTube's only indicating that one has received additional views since Lawler performed his analysis, so this is a real possibility.

The second issue relates to YouTube's country restrictions.  In response to the YouTube Blog post announcing the movie rentals, several commenters have complained about geographic blocks, so there may be a sizable international audience that's been shut out.

Finally, it's possible that the movies are just bad (at least by YouTube users' standards).  Ratings have been disabled for two of the films, and the other three are averaging roughly two out of five stars.

This last explanation wouldn't salvage the current experiment, of course, but it might be that the general concept of renting movies through YouTube hasn't quite run into a brick wall.

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