YouTube to VCast on Verizon
This news announcement sparks a lot of questions in my mind.
YouTube moves to the small screen
First off its a little confusing because it says,
Users who subscribe to Verizon’s Vcast service will be able to view content on the YouTube website via their mobiles.
and then states this,
The new deal will mean that VCast users, who pay $15 a month to watch and download video to their mobile, will have access to a limited number of approved videos from YouTube.
How do you go from saying that the Vcast service will be able to view content on the YouTube website and then say they will have access to a limited number of approved videos? First off, the YouTube.com website is a Flash/FLV based media player and Vcast is a Mpeg4 based service, would be interesting to know how they implemented that one. I assume this might be some of the reason for limited number of approved videos? because converting FLV to other formats right now is not something of a smooth process. But we are talking about going from a larger resolution to a smaller one so even if you are going from a compressed format to another you will be alright. Most YouTube.com movies are compressed alot though so I wonder if they are limiting it to videos they have the source to?
Well like I said this new article sparked more questions then answers. It was nice to see that they hooked up a 5-digit code to send videos to for uploading videos. This should make the expansion of social-video-networking go up quite a bit. It would be really cool, this is way out there, to have this fuel Verizon’s relationship with Adobe and push the Vcast system to use FLV (and Flash Lite 2.X/3.0???) instead of or in addition to the Mpeg4 based service of right now. Anything that pushes Flash forward on the mobile device arena is cool.