• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, September 1, 2010

Okay, granted, every digital film library has to start somewhere. Back in the day when no one in Hollywood was eager to license anything online, the early catalogs at downloadable movie pioneers like Movieline were laughably bad. Straight-to-video animation and sub-B horror were the mainstays. With the limited but passable Watch Instantly collection at Netflix, we began to take heart. Maybe full-length film really had found its way onto the Internet in a credible fashion. Well, then there was that Hulu Plus hiccup. I used to think the circa-2003 downloadable movie hubs were bad until I saw what Hulu was passing off as a movie catalog.

And now taking a further step back to the yesteryears of digital media, YouTube launches a free movie service that will aggregate public domain movies already posted and fold in over 400 others they just added after a deal with Sony and the UK Blinkbox service. According to a report in the Guardian (UK), Google will share ad revenues attached to the studios' films. Pre- and mid-roll ads are inserted in most of the films I tested. In fact, there are about three or four such breaks throughout most films.

Oh, and what films they are, too. "The Secret Life of Adolf Hitler" (815,000 views), "Red Swastika" (804,000), and "OC Babes and the Slasher of Zombietown" (361,000). That last one has to hold the record for the largest collection of content label warnings I have seen: L (strong language), N+ (graphic nudity), S+ (explicit sexual situations), V+ (strongly violent and disturbing) and D (mild drug abuse). When did the "+" start creeping into these ratings? Are there any minuses? "N-" for not enough nudity?

To be fair, YouTube Movies does have some great curiosities in the library, including the original animated version of "Animal Farm" and brilliantly deranged midnight movie hits like "The Corpse Grinders." Much of the Jackie Chan oeuvre is here. And thankfully the "Three Stooges" show up to bang some heads and poke some eyes. Nyuk, nyuk.

There is also a stop-motion and really creepy version of "Hansel and Gretel" from 1954, which I think was still making the Saturday afternoon kiddie matinees when I was hanging at the Rivoli theater in Rutherford, N.J. in 1968. There is something inadvertently obscene about wooden furniture springing to life and dancing with children. Amazing my generation wasn't damaged more than it was after living through such atrocities.

I come away from the YouTube Movies project not just wishing for more and better movies, but looking also for a better viewing experience Is the YouTube interface really suitable for anything video-related, so far as Google is concerned? And instead of focusing on library scale, how about drilling instead into video quality? It is wonderful to have great film classics like "Night of the Living Dead" at our fingertips, but shouldn't it be part of YouTube's charge here to get the best available copies and establish some sort of baseline? I am pretty sure I noticed video scan lines in more of the few of the films, including titles that YouTube itself featured.

This kind of one-size-fits-all approach to organizing content and policy for aggregating good-enough content leaves me wondering how much Google really does respect or understand the media consumption experience.