It’s called a little Casio or Radio Shack (or equivalent) pocket-size LCD television.

I can remember seeing advertisements for these things as far back as the 1980’s. And unlike the pathetic attempts at cellular television…

…True television is free.
…The picture quality is far superior to cell phone video.
…The frame rate is much faster and smoother. In fact, it’s just as fast and smooth as a home theater setup!
…Coverage is better, since TV stations transmit with far more RF power than cell phone towers do.

Cellular telephone television is a joke. And anyone who’s dumb enough to cough up the cash to pay for such a crummy and inferior gadget is a fool. Especially when a Casio pocket TV can be had for a ONE TIME COST of about $80… still cheaper than about 2 months worth of phone bills with mobile TV subscription.

NewTeeVee , a new site for GigaOM run by Om Malik, posts a review of MSN Soapbox that offers some insights…

imagine for a moment that verizon is sirrius radio and youtube is howardstern. when sirrius signed howard my sirrius rates did not go up…well, at least not immediately, it took a day…just kidding :)

verizon will continue to add services and applications to their mobile plans as the marginal utility of each new service is greater than the previous service. this, in theory will incent verizon to continue to build the value prop far beyond voice and data lines and into all sorts of opportunities. an ecosystem which provides a platform for third party companies to market their own ‘widgets’ on the platform…similar to salesforce.com app exchange.

did anyone really expect free connectivity and bandwidth would be provided to consumer so they can download rambo, star wars and hot gun? anyone catch that? :), i think services like what verizon provides today will eventually be free to consumers but only because it is being paid for by subsidization. also know as big brother is taking marketing and branding and messaging to a whole new dimension targeted and hidden so we keep thinking that kleenex is another name for tissue and not a company or that google is a company and not an action.

not to digress but is this partnership really such a big deal? can’t you just enter youtube.com into your mobile browser and go? and lastly, couldn’t they have come up with a better story on how theyll determine which videos make it to the area where wireless vrzn users will be able to download? they must have been out getting blingy, because if i were them i surely wouldn’t be worrying about the next code release, and missed how the blogosphere went borderline nutts over a reprint of kevin roses quote from 2005 re moderators?

what would be really cool social mobile app is a youtube/twitter/flickr combo community oriented service application because then it really has relevance and delivers unique content to each user. part of the compelling thing about youtube is that if i get a viewing recommendation from my buddies, i trust it will be worth watching. as good as verizon may become, it is highly probable that i never have that level of trust with verizon or any telco, mso or isp.

I ahve written about the powers of content distributors and packagers at the MediaVidea blog.

Verizon announced a deal with YouTube to access select videos over your phone, for a $15 monthly fee. This “walled garden” approach has many up in arms, and screaming that this is taking a step backwards for leveraging social media and in a…

To do that, distribution is the key, and the carriers hold those keys in the mobile world. Carriers make money (and share money) based on a) data consumed, and b) airtime. Think about what this means for YouTube!

Pre-acquisition, everyone claimed that YT was in trouble due to the huge data costs. In mobile, huge data means huge revenues, it’s a perfect fit.

Only selecting certain videos to display is almost certainly due to Verizons worries about online porn and copyright violations, but how upset should that make you? On a more pragmatic note, the mobile interface isn’t suited to having 10 million videos to search through. Much better to have 100 that are known to be “good”, and probably lend themselves to targeted marketing.

It’s only a walled garden because it makes more money for Verizon and stops lawsuits.

Do people really want a non-constrained YouTube of mobile? I know people who have a platform that would enable that in about 2 months time. I’ll introduce you.

Their walled gardens are never going to open up. Someone please lay a parallel network.

I don’t care if it’s flash, WMV MOV or whatever else, playing media has to become easy via a wap page for this conversation to matter. Until then, user generated video on mobile doesn’t matter. The problem with UGC is you have to click on at least a few duds to get one gem. As long as those duds load slow and are hard to click out of to get to the next one quickly then not many people will care.

Here’s a tip for all you carriers & mobile media barons, get the premium stuff right before you try to get the fancy stuff. Truthfully, Comedy Central, ESPN & E! should be leading this space and attracting people to mobile TV viewing. Given The Daily Show & Colbert’s popularity and demo they should be leading the way in ad supported mobile TV which spurs data uptake. If they haven’t made an impact do you really think Brookers is going to spur America to pay the extra money for a data plan? Think again.

Oh, one more thing, I don’t know what kind of crack you guys are smoking to think that people are willing to pay another $4.99 on top of the $15+ dollars in data for EACH channel they want to see but it must be good. People barely want to pay $6 for phone insurance or nights and weekends. Mobile TV should be free. Once it becomes entertaining and free you will see widespread sign ups to data plans… but alas, it’s neither. YouTube will just add more hard to view crappy clips to the pot for an even more frustrating mobile tv experience.

Thanks guys.

Until a disrupter starts eroding Verizon’s business, they will remain walled garden-ish, IMHO.

I’m in the online video space (CEO of social networking for video platform provider, vSocial.com) and a Verizon customer, but the simple fact is that I gauge them based on reliable voice and email. Everything else is gravy.

Cheers,

Mark

Visit the network garden: http://www.thenetworkgarden.com
my blog on active investing, digital media and daily nuggets of interest

Deja view!

As to YouTube doing the deal…well, what did y’all honestly expect - this is the game they have to play now.