The Screening Room will feature four short films every two weeks, as well as the occasional full-length feature.
The first few slates of films are filled with recognizable names and Academy Award-nominated film-makers, but as the programme continues YouTube expects to include films submitted to a kind of cinema slush pile, to keep at least a modicum of the "You" in its name.
The first hour of fine films under the YouTube banner is a strong sign the site is no longer just a place to watch cat videos and Family Guy.
This is YouTube's first serious foray into the world of cinema and many are likely to be watching.
The first four films showcase the creative flexibility of the short form and the way it nicely lends itself to bite-size online viewing.
The Danish Poet, an animated modern fairy tale by Canada's Torill Kove, won the 2007 Oscar for best animated short, and the mind-bending puppet opera Love and War won Fredrik Emilson an award in the same category at last year's Los Angeles Film Festival.
Miranda July's Are You the Favorite Person of Anybody?, starring John C Reilly, represented the excellent quarterly DVD magazine Wholphin, and Rob Pearlstein's Our Time Is Up, starring Kevin Pollak, was nominated for an Oscar in 2006.
"It's difficult to get a mass audience for short films via the film festival route," said Mr Pearlstein, speaking of YouTube's theoretical capability to focus millions of eyeballs on these shorts in a way Sundance or Cannes never could.
Nor does the festival circuit act as a living library, as the Internet might.
"Typically a short film has quite a short life - if you're lucky, a year or two," Kove said.
"And I think this is a really good way to prolong that."
Films shown in the online Screening Room will be eligible for YouTube's revenue-sharing programme, whereby filmmakers split some of the income from the advertising that accompanies their movies.
YouTube never says much about what this can amount to, but stories circulate about the odd person who can make a living by stringing together enough million-plus-hit video clips.
"It's important to be able to enable others by helping them finance their next project," said Jordan Hoffner, YouTube's director of content partnerships.
"We've seen that a lot with Google," he said, alluding to its advertising system for Web sites.
"People were able to quit their day jobs and do the things they were really passionate about."
Sounds good, but a word to the wise: Don't do it in that order. - David Sarno.
