What a JOKE. What user base is going to pay for the data transfer to watch Dick and Jane videos?

All I have to say to the above comment is — “What person thought Google would pay $1.65 BILLION for a company that has gnerated $0??”

Rex

@kaiju-

I think your missing the point:

Its not about Dick and Jane, its about targeted advertisements.

“I have a hard time believing that Google won’t roll out a mobile YouTube product in far less than 14 months. Particularly given this morning’s launch of Gmail for Mobile”

Months metween Gmail launch and Gmail for Mobile: 20.

Here’s another take talking about how Hurley’s claim that this would be a “huge market” is really not much more than the same people using YouTube somewhere else (not a new market):

http://www.computers.net/2006/.....ming_.html

Yeah this isn’t gonna happen for me; with my mighty $4/mb data transfer I’d be visiting the Bank Manager for a loan to watch crap movies :p

Stuart
http://www.earnersblog.com

“What person thought Google would pay $1.65 BILLION for a company that has gnerated $0??”

I did. And I believe it’s common knowledge that YouTube is already making decent revenues (despite having only raised $12m).

I thought 14 months sounded like ages too. But then again- is there really demand for videos on cell phones? Not until the carriers get us to Japan/Finland speed.

BTW- Revver isn’t a competitor to YouTube. The only thing they have in common is video. It’s like calling Visa a competitor to Walmart.

Revver enables videos and pays creators. YouTube is a popular community in which users volunteer while the company profits selling ads.

Nalts, I think you’re right about the competition thing, old habits die hard. Revver is totally not a YouTube competitor.

The costs of mobile bandwidth will continue to drop as the technology advances. One day we will wonder why we ever paid for it. It will become subsidized just like everything else.

Nalts is right about the demand for video in North America; it’s just not there at this time.

Maybe when the speeds increase it will change, but people just don’t use them here the way other countries do.

It may be more of an international play for them.

I think it’s more a response to MySpace saying that they’re going to do this soon so they’re not considered yesterday’s news in this area.

There are a lot of issues delivering video to mobile: network speeds, codecs, etc..

BTW - Adobe won the emmy.
Adobe Wins Emmy Award For Flash Video
http://www.adobe.com/aboutadob.....6Emmy.html

Hello?

You guys have to look down the road on this one! Content. Content.

Who is google going to partner with?

Who are the original content creators for mobile device and how do they plan to monetize their content?

Do they create their own ad agency or partner with others?

There are beginning to be agencies who work only online for video bloggers and advertisers. This is a great idea and there is a growing market. PostTroller.com is an example of a 50/50 ad share agency attempt. Personally that cut is not fair. 50 percent compared to what well established agents receive, 20 percent, is off balance. Though Postroller allows a 50/50 add share, they give video bloggers the control over what kind of ads will run in the adds. They believe their model is different than other video hosting sites because they want to be the middle man between the advertisers and the video bloggers.

Google is thinking in the right direction.

thats really great that youtube is going to be mobile.i was in great need to start video blogging in my tech blog.

Having built apps for the desktop, server and mobile device I can tell you that moving YouTube to mobile will be no trivial. Think about the problems Skype is having.

The killer is taking all those rich API’s that you take for granted on the desktop and finding the equivalent on the mobile platform. J2ME is very immature and no doubt be the “OS” of choice for the YouTube team.

Been there done that - the cross platform interoperability is a nightmare, as evidenced yesterday with Gmail for mobile. You simply have to test your brains out.

Finally you have the advertising model to deal with…. the desktop “channel” is segmented from the “mobile channel” requiring multiple ad support infrastructures which are expensive to design and build.

I’d say 14 months is about right. Now who will care by then I don’t know.

to stuart (6) and kaiju(1): I think you aren’t aware that for more than a year now, Cingular has been offering unlimited bandwidth for data plans for $25/month. I’d think other carriers might have similar offers …

Uhhh, 14 months? I can watch YouTube and Google Videos on my Treo 700p today using Kinoma’s new player…

http://www.kinoma.com/index/player4

I just tried the Kinoma Player 4 on my Palm Treo 700p and I can get the Daily Show episodes if I make a channel with the following feed:

http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/dailyshow.rss

You basically can find anything on YouTube with adding tags to the URL feed.

Example:
http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/.rss

What is also cool is the Kinoma Player plays the next video in the list, so you can watch a lot of content one after another.

Pretty cool!

You can watch YouTube videos on mobile phones today using Orb 2.0. It streams the videos into Real Player on my nokia, and they support windows media player and 3GP too. Plus you get all your personal videos and music…
http://www.orb.com/getorb2