Good news movie lovers. YouTube has confirmed that starting today it will add rughly 3,000 new movie titles for rental in the US, as well as reviews and behind the scenes extras. NBC Universal, Sony Pictures and Warner Bros. are the new studios that YouTube is partnering with to add these new and catalog releases. It will double the amount previously available.

Pricing is $2.99 and $3.99 for movies viewed via your PC or Google TV. There was no mention of other devices supported. And though YouTube supports resolutions up to 4K, “most” of the new additions are in SD, which is kinda sad. Still, at least you have more choice than you did before.

Can Facebook compete with Netflix when it comes to renting movies? Well, they are going to try. Warner Brothers has just announced that they will be offering video stream rentals of their movies through the online social network. Right now they have just one title available: The Dark Knight.

Users can rent a movie for 30 Facebook Credits ($3) and you get 48 hours to finish the movie. You can watch the movie through the site and still access Facebook functions while it is playing. More titles will arrive in the coming months, and The Dark Knight is just a test to see how popular it is.

You can find all kinds of stupid pet tricks and stupid human tricks on YouTube, but no pay-per-view content like Apple, Amazon, and others. Well, the Financial Times is reporting that parent company Google has been in talks with “Hollywood’s leading movie studios” for several months regarding the launch of an international pay-per-view service by the end of this year.

Looks like it would cost about $5 for new titles (streaming, not download) that would be available the same time as the DVD releases. The site has been doing rentals on a trial basis since early this year, with a handful of indie titles.

Blockbuster is still trying hard to catch up with other services despite lagging far behind. Their latest trick? If you’re receiving your Blockbuster movies by snail mail you’ll soon be able to open your mailbox and find Xbox, PlayStation, and Wii games as well.

As usual for Blockbuster this is too little, too late. But if you are interested and have a Blockbuster account, go for it.

In an effort to unsettle Netflix, Blockbuster and Comcast have teamed up to offer their new service, which is called DVDs By Mail. This is basically a discounted Blockbuster Online subscription for Comcast customers.

The site’s only advantage is discounted pricing for existing Comcast subscribers with a Double or Triple Play package. If you log in to your Comcast account it looks like you will be greeted with a dollar off Blockbuster’s most basic, one disc at a time plan ($7.99 versus $8.99). All other options are priced as they would be for a non-Comcast customer.

YouTube has announced that it will offer video rentals through its site. They will be offering the rentals in sync with the Sundance Film Festival and they plan to rent movies from the 2009 and 2010 Sundance festivals as well as “other U.S. partners.”

The festival films will be available through January 31st, while other movies and videos should be available soon after. The expansion into rentals is part of a strategy to get away from ad-only revenue and is said to give content providers much more control over how video content is shown. Providers signed up to the YouTube system will have the option of setting the price, rental period and where it can be found.

I don’t know how you are, but when I buy something, like say a movie, I like to be able to use it as many times as I see fit. I paid good money for it after all. Apparently, users who purchase movies from the Sony PS3 video store are allowed to download it only one more time. Which sucks. Sony does tell you in their license agreement that “Content cannot be redownloaded once it has been downloaded to either a PLAYSTATION 3 or PSP system.” I guess the moral of the story is to treat digital downloads as rented movies rather then purchases.

This should make a lot of people happy. After a bit of a wait, I present the first Netflix set-top-box. Previously, Instant Viewing was available only to Windows PC users through the IE browser. But now, thanks to Roku, users can finally tap into at least a chunk of the Netflix library without having to wait for those damn discs in your mailbox for just $99.99.

The Netflix Player can even use a wireless signal to stream, but performance may differ here and there. It’s got HDMI, component, composite, Ethernet, S-Video and a Toslink optical audio jack as far as ports go. No HD support, but things look quite positive so far.

Irish startup PortoMedia will soon be offering movie rentals on flash drives instead of your typical media device. It’s a pretty simple concept. The company sells you a flash storage device along with a special $50 card reader that has a super fast proprietary USB connection of 95 megabits per second.

Just take the flash card to any location that has a company kiosk. The kiosks will contains hard drives that store hundreds or even thousands of movies. Enter your ATM pin code, choose your movie, and download it in less than a minute. After that, you just go home and watch it. It does have it’s advantages over DVD or Blu-Ray. They would never run out of movies, no return neccessary, no long lines and you could get movies anywhere, whether it be the mall, supermarket, even a gas station.