YouTube to Invade Mobile Phones

Posted on January 29, 2008 at 7:34 am

YouTube, the leading video sharing website there is, will be opening its doors to mobile phone users who wants to access its vast library of homemade clips and recorded shows.

Through 3G technology and streaming video support from the mobile phones’ end, the video sharing subsidiary of Google allows owners of wireless devices to access their entire library anywhere. “That includes hundreds of models,” the company said.

On June 15 of 2007, YouTube Mobile was launched. It is YouTube’s mobile site that uses technologies like xHTML, 3GP videos with H263/AMR codec, and RTSP streaming.

According to Hunter Walk, product manager for YouTube, the mobile site now allows any wireless device that can handle video to view or post their own clips similar to how they would do it on a personal computer. “Until today, mobile phone users only had access to a limited amount of YouTube content,” he said.

In an interview from YouTubes office, Walk said YouTube’s popularity and maturity will drive them to explore and evaluate advertisement opportunities. “What we heard from our users is (that) they really wanted access to the tens of millions of videos on YouTube no matter where they are.” However, YouTube will not advertise for now, since monetizing the mobile site is not on their plan list.

YouTube Mobile’s video sharing service is expected to work with about 100 million devices, including phones AT&T and Sprint 3G where YouTube is attuned with.

Google, YouTube’s Foster Parent

Being a specialist in Internet search and online advertising, Google did a wise move by buying YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion. And being the marketing company that Google had been, it has considered introducing its services to the mobile world.

With present telecommunications companies considering connections via the Internet, and with present companies of mobile phone technology incorporating browsers and establishing connections between mobile phones and the web, it comes with no surprise that Google will accommodate changes and get into mobile technology as a big service provider.

Mobile sites sure are great sources of revenue, as it had been expected that by 2011, the mobile advertising market will gush tenfold. Google, along with its rival search engines Yahoo! and Microsoft work hard for gaining the greater portion from (as estimated by the New York-based research firm eMarketer Inc.) the $16.2 billion of the expected ad market overgrowth.

What drives that sudden increase in the ad market would be the mobile phone owners’ constant search for something new, something that will fully utilize the capacities of their mobile phones. In turn, telecommunications companies as well as mobile phone ones keep their customer at a suspended shock state as they keep on launching bandwidth-intensive services and wireless assistance.

Knowing that it has advantage over other search engines because of YouTube, Google started showing ads on web videos in 2007. Also, allowing the embedding of videos and related ads in other websites puts Google in the leading positions. “The mobile experience is increasingly going to be like an extension of the Web experience,” Walk said. Loki

[tags]google, youtube, youtube mobile, mobile phones, wireless, videos, streaming[/tags]

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