Google has struck a deal with Weinstein Co. to land premium content deals for YouTube. While everyone expected both companies to brag about their deal, given YouTube’s lack of prominent, premium video offerings, a closer look at the scenario revealed some details leading up to the quiet agreement.

Some of the titles from Weinstein Co., including Scary Movie 4 and Death Proof, are already available for rent on YouTube at $2.99 per film. So far, a few people have noticed, and these got 649 views in just one day.  This has earned $1,947 for both Weinstein and Google to split among them.

YouTube’s rental strategy was started a year back at the Sundance Film Festival but so far, follow up reports are limited and not very insightful. Several hundred movies were made available in the store that time, some of which are not available now including One too many mornings and Homewrecker.

There are so many dubious things about this deal such as when exactly this deal was struck. It is because the residing page of these films say that they were uploaded on November 18, 2009. If this is true, why these were not promoted earlier?

“We’re always updating the YouTube Rental store with new movies and we encourage users to check in frequently to see the new titles that are available,” commented a Weinstein Co. spokeswoman.

Most of the movies taken in the deal were released from 2004-2007, an awkward period between Harvey Weinstein’s fall from Miramax.

Online video is becoming a strong competitor for other media and among all others, YouTube remains the best-ranked online video channel. The unique phenomenon of free video upload has greatly transformed the online video industry. Nielsen has also named Google owned YouTube as the best mobile internet video channel.

This counts as an important victory for Google.  The search giant of course wants  many people to visit its sites as possible, and that may go double for YouTube, considering the $1.65 billion Google paid for the site.

The essence behind this Nielsen report is that mobile TV and online video are becoming hotter trend these days. And this importance has been realized by major industry players including Google. The realization of this fact and implementation in its favor has led to a number of YouTube mobile views exceeding by 200 million per day; a threefold increase in 2010. To further increase its viewership, Google has also updated the YouTube app for Android devices.

“Tens of thousands of YouTube partner videos will also now have pre-roll ads appear on the YouTube 2.0 app for Android,” YouTube said in a blog post. “This not only expands distribution opportunities for partners like Vevo, but also opens up more revenue to partners distributing their content to mobile.”