We will see this fee decrease in time as the competition heats up.

YouTube and Verizon will have to be user-center or else user will resist MobiTube. “Select” should be whatever users select to view.

For now, sign me up.

I wander if this is why YouTube went after the download youtube video tool.

stop people taking the videos on the move but letting them use them instead from their own gateway.

Lose-win? Yes. Will content providers be charged a premium for their videos to be streamed over the Verizon network? Is that how “select” is defined? If so, that’s a much different YouTube than what we know today.

The inevitable next move for online video services. something similar from other players is likely to appear shortly.
Btw - tinytube.net already offers streaming of youtube’s popular titles.

With technology advancing, why not have access via the mobile browser?

“Select” video probably means screened video - i.e. no Janet Jackson moments. Wireless operators are becoming broadcasters essentially, so Verizon needs to be careful what it “broadcasts.”

Maybe this is why the mms upload function from my verizon wireless handset to youtube has been broken for the last few weeks. It worked for a few weeks then died. The simple response from youtube support was that “our mobile platform is still being developed”. Their fix was to send videos from my phone to my email and then upload via the normal youtube website.

hmmm

How big of a loser does one have to be to watch videos on his/her cell-phone? Get outside guys . . . work, exercise, get away from your computers. YOU GEEKS.

Okay, that’s what my mom would say. For me, videos on cellphone, hooreyyyyyyyyyyyy!!

What are the penetration rates so far for V-Cast and others? ESPN Mobile has been a bust. Who’s going to watch?

Will there, at some point, be a backlash from popular YouTube producers when they find their content on Verizon and YouTube is making money from it but they themselves are not?

When you upload a video onto YouTube, you grant YouTube a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to essentially do whatever they want with it, however if you delete your content, that license expires (according to YouTube’s terms of use). I wonder if the deletion of content from YouTube occurs automatically and simultaneously on Verizon, since technically YouTube and Verizon would be infringing upon the producer’s copyright if the content still appears on Verizon after it has been deleted from YouTube.

Eric, I don’t think that the ESPN Mobile bust was about the desire for mobile content. I think people do want mobile content but ESPN’s problem was that people don’t want a whole mobile phone plan around their content. Or even if they do want it, they can’t get out of their contracts with their carriers right away to get it. Disney dropped ESPN Mobile prematurely. That’s what I think anyway. The point is people do want content on their phones. I just don’t know if they want whatever “select” video content that YouTube decides to feed them.

I’m going to guess: “smaller and lamer.”

$180 to watch videos (yearly fee)… vs. Desktop version which is free. The “differentiator” will be the “select” video’s. If you take the average price of a rental video at the store as $3 you can rent 60 movies. More than 1 per week.

Select had better be pretty darn special to warrant $180 a year.

Interesting. I have to admit there is no video I want to see bad enough or with enough urgency to merit its delivery to my cell phone but I think there’s a novelty to it that carriers can play with among a younger than me audience

I have to be honest, this kinda smells like “anytime, anywhere productivity” that was pushed hard in 1998 which played out very differently than what everybody expected (at the cost of a few of my clients at that time folding).

I think we’re a ways away from really knowing what consumers want in terms of mobile content to their phones, particularly video.

I will admit that I’m a huge Internet video junky, but I don’t get watching video on my cellphone. I can see how it might be interesting for a few minutes but it seems the novelty would wear off fast. Toss that $15 a month charge and I don’t see it being a blast.
I don’t see it.

Isn’t part of the appeal of YouTube that you can search around and find other videos you like? Its like Verizon threw out one of the good things about YouTube and replaced it with a top-down state run TV station. What brainiac thought this one up?

No matter how hard I try I just can’t imagine watching videos on my cellphone, particularly with a fee attached. The screen’s just too small to really enjoy the experience. I certainly can’t imagine wanting to do it often enough to subscribe to a service.

Very disappointing. YouTube is a web site. What they should have done, if it was technically possible, was to create a mobile Java client for their site, much like Google has done with many of their services (Gmail, Google Maps, etc.). Instead, they are buying into the silo cell service business, which is the opposite of everything YouTube and Web 2.0 are built upon.

Nate: I see the reason they didn’t go that route as a cell phone’s keyboard input sucks. Could you imagine typing “colbert” in a tiny box using predictive text? Maybe the kids can do that but that’s near a ring of hell for me. It is annoying enough to correct the 7100 series blackberry with only 2 characters per key.

I’m surprised that Verizon didn’t come out with a “push content to your phone” model where you find a view on YouTube when surfing on a normal computer and then send a link to your cell phone. Cuz you know you’re already watching it on a 17″+ screen, wouldn’t you want to see it in on 1.5″ one?

Next up from the brain trust: voice activated YouTube. Because you want everyone on the bus to know that you’re searching for 20 year old girls covered in whipped cream. Delete delete delete

Call me a skeptic. I just don’t see this as ready for prime time. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. The focus of the wireless carriers should be GPS, maps, location-based ads (come in to the store you are right next to and get 50% of a pizza…) I am on the road right now and even on a fast WiFi connection it is a huge pain to look at a web-page from my T-Mobile MDA. Watch video on it? Why? This is the kind of deal designed to make shareholders feel better and teenagers buy phones.

Q: What Will YouTube Be Like On Your Mobile Phone?

A: Much smaller.

There are a number of issues with the Youtube/Verizon deal:

1. Content is not free - behind VCast walled garden.
2. Content is programmed - Verizon, not users, determine what users view.
3. Content cannot be shared - no P2P mobile video sharing.

Youtube missed an opportunity here — to develop a mobile service that offers the same excitement which it delivers online — namely, the ability for users, not programmers, to upload and share their content with anyone with a mobile phone.

Sounds like a neat idea, though I don’t think mobile phones are going to become our technological center as many people think. Simply because who wants to utilize a screen this small? This has been demonstrated in a similar technology, Video iPods.

>> “What does “select” video mean?”

There are most likely two reasons for ’select’

Once is simply (as John commented) screening. Carriers are very careful about the type of content available on their network. This is nothing new, and they take every and any step to make sure that they do not get unwanted support/complaint calls (very expensive) or even worse bad publicity. Even if this means that their services as bland. Verizon and T-Mobile are good examples of paranoid carriers.

The other one is simply practicality and cost.
Making ALL YouTube content available is a big undertaking. Especially as for mobile phones it will be necessary to transcode the content into the right format for the different phones. Typically you need at the moment 3-4 different profiles (screen resolution, bandwidth, codecs). Transcoding everything beforehand is costly (and most content will never been seen via mobile) and doing it on-the-fly is even crazier (currently a dual CPU box can do two on-the-fly transcodings at the same time).
Therefore I suspect that it will be featured, top viewed, most discussed etc content that will be available.

Having dealt with mobile video now for a while that is what I would have done and I suspect that Verizon and YouTube are going through the same thoughts.

The Walled Garden Idea is no in.

Remember YouTube’s headache: how to bring revenue in.
On the web they cannot go back and introduce a charge. On a new platform though they play differently. As I ‘ve said many time there is little about openness and fairness in YouTube business. It’s like a Hollywood studio that does not pay its producers and artists (or at least that’s what it wants to become)

I believe you are referring to monetizing the videos themselves - this is an unnecessary step. What is important is the “indirect monetization.” You can bet that Verizon paid a decent chunk of money to get the YouTube partnership and it would be easy to see why people would pay Verizon for YouTube capabilities (subscriptions)… Verizon could also force users to watch paid advertisements, say 1 for every 3 regular videos sent. I think this was a brilliant move by Verizon. My blog entry on this is here: http://intelligrad.com/blog/?p=107

I’m not surprised becuase Microsoft’s Soapbox is already doing this.

http://soapboxteam.spaces.live.com

Check out the hammer that Youtube put on Tinytube for showing videos on their mobile portal:

http://gigaom.com/2006/12/06/tinytube/