YouTube to launch mobile website soon
CTIA 2007 — YouTube will launch its mobile website in June 2007 for U.S. users, according to a spokesperson. The mobile YouTube site will go live once the exclusivity clause on the company’s mobile video deal with Verizon Wireless expires. The service will be live for European users in May. YouTube has been already working closely with mobile carriers, and handset makers such as Nokia on the mobile version of their video service.
In response to my question if YouTube is developing a mobile client, the spokesperson said that the company had been talking about it, but had no information to share at this time. Check out a preview of the blocked mobile site or this demo site: http://m.youtube.com/?client=ytdemo which you can see from some mobile phones (let us know if your phone can access it).
The mobile site when it goes live will have around 800 “editorial picks” of videos to choose from. It’s kind of an experiment to see how well things go and how good of a response the company gets, the spokesperson explained to us. Though, the end goal is to create a truly mobile YouTube experience with eventual access to the entire video catalog.
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Too sad!
All the Youtube links in your article don’t work. Every page says “This page is not available”. I was really courious to see Youtube on my Nokia E61. Neither the Nokia browser nor Opera mini show me a movie.
Does anybody know how the built in Flash Player works? It seems to play only downloaded Flash animations. But who has that? Flash is normally embedded in websites like Youtube.
Markus
they work on some mobile phones. this is a wap only service it seems.
They’re certainly hiring for it.
http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=282171&fromSearch=7&sik=1175016860358
i got nothing. “this page is not available”
bb peal 8100
I was able to view it on my Nokia 6680. You can see a screen capture here -
http://kempmullaney.com/blog2/2007/03/youtube_togo_surfaces.html
It isn’t much, but the page is definately formatted for mobile devices.
[…][…] YouTube Mobile – YouTube’s mobile site will go live in June 2007, once the exclusivity clause on the deal with Verizon Wireless ends. (via) […][…]
Is this just for the US?
There already are plenty of websites available to watch or download videos from a mobile device. Exclusivity wont help YouTube gain any paid gains for its mobile site.
On related note, Gmail has been down for hours today. Infact, the Gmail website also doesn’t respond. It seems Google is having problems with scalability.
Yakito, the site will be live for US users in June and earlier for users in Europe. Im not sure for other areas. I actually went back to the booth and double checked with the YouTube spokesperson on the different months for different geographies because I thought it was surprising — spokesperson said the site will be blocked for the US until the exclusivity of the Verizon Wireless deal runs out.
For commenters who aren’t able to access the mobile YouTube site — that’s because it hasn’t launched yet. The demo link (http://m.youtube.com/?client=ytdemo)
is something that was unearthed by some bloggers over the past few weeks and it seems like only select phones have been able to access it. I don’t think YouTube meant to leave that link unblocked, and I’m not sure of the phone criteria for access of it. If I learn more about it, I’ll update the post.