While users can already upload videos to YouTube using mobile phones, there currently is no way to watch videos from YouTube by phone. That could all change within the next year, however. At the OgilvyOne Verge Digital Summit yesterday, YouTube founder Chad Hurley stated that by the end of 2007, YouTube would likely “have something on a mobile device.”
With the recent Google buyout of YouTube and Google becoming increasingly mobile, I daresay, we’ll start seeing YouTube on mobile devices sooner than year’s end 2007. At any rate, we’ll keep you posted as more information develops.
YouTube to Go Mobile [Adage via ArsTechnica]
Actually, owners of the Palm Treo and other devices that can operate the newly released Kinoma Media Player 4EX can watch YouTube and Google Video along with many other online video sources now.
http://www.kinoma.com/index/Player4
I watched a bunch of videos last night and the quality of both picture and sound is excellent streaming over Sprint’s EVDO network.
It shows you that Mobile is a different environment. YouTube went from nothing to $1.65b in 21 months… now they say it will take 14 months just to get to mobile.
There are two problems…
1. Bandwidth. The cellular network is a radio network not the same as “copper”. Downloading a 3mb – 5mb is going to eat the processor
2. The advertising model. The web is segmented from a channel perspective. The desktop attributes (mouse, big screen, keyboard, high speed processor) are simply not available on the mobile device. It gets back to your holy grail argument – how can I send something so compelling to the “customer” that he wants to read it. You can’t until you know more about him – and right now the carriers aren’t sharing that information – and asking the mobile user to type in anything on that device is simply a non starter.
Cheers,
Peter
The more important question is the percentage of YouTube’s audience that accesses the Internet via their mobile device. If that number is low, does anyone care about a 14 month time horizon???
The application of a mobile YouTube is perplexing. Do people really want to look at a tiny little screen for more than 3 seconds?
fyi – http://www.moblr.com — in beta version — already delivers videos for mobile devices
Actually, you can watch youtube videos on your phone now at tinytube.net – the site transcodes them on-demand to 3GP for mobile playback.
Cool, the only thing missing is the kind of cell phone that this would work well on. The thing that would bother me is if I tried to watch more than one minute videos how would the connection hold out?
you can use orb.com to stream videos
We’ve done what YouTube is describing.
You can visit our site and check it out.
All content on this site is both searchable and streamable to handhelds.
Regards,
Mark Krebs
CTO, Movidity Inc.
http://www.movidity.com
see…www.movy.tv
I think it’s a great idea to bring YouTube to mobile devices across the globe.