After iPhone Here Come the YouTube Phones
Posted on | July 4, 2007 |
Get ready for the YouTube phone. LG Electronics announced on Tuesday that it has signed an agreement with the world’s most popular video-sharing Web site to develop YouTube-optimized handsets.The YouTube-enabled mobile devices will have a new interface that enables users to readily shoot, view, and upload videos as they would with their home computers, according to a statement by LG President and CEO Skott Ahn.
LG, the world’s fifth largest manufacturer of handsets, said in a statement that the first of the YouTube-enabled handsets will be released in Europe later this year, and worldwide by the end of 2007.
‘Google Phones’
In March, LG also announced an agreement with YouTube’s parent company, Google, to preinstall the search giant’s services on its handsets, including search, Gmail, and Google Maps. The first of these so-called “Google phones” began selling in Europe this spring, offering mobile access to Google’s services.
But LG’s alliances with search giants are not exclusive to Google. The company has a deal to offer Yahoo applications, including Yahoo Go for Mobile 2.0, Yahoo Mail, and Yahoo Messenger, on some handsets.
YouTube is not exclusive with LG. Since late last year, Verizon’s VCast service has offered some limited YouTube services. But the major parallel to the LG deal is the one YouTube and Apple made for optimizing the iPhone for the video site.
Apple said that the iPhone would be the “first mobile device” to display videos encoded with the H.264 standard. YouTube has begun converting its videos to the H.264 format, which is said to provide DVD quality in small file sizes.
But, because Apple’s iPhone is not yet released in Europe, LG’s YouTube phone could get the first shot at tapping the video-sharing market there. That market is huge, with more than 100 million YouTube videos watched every day.
‘Who Needs Girls Gone Wild?’
The move by YouTube into alliances with mobile device makers is “a natural extension as handsets get more capable,” observed Michael McGuire, an analyst at industry research firm Gartner.
On one hand, he said, it will lead to new kinds of mobile-shot video, such as waves of YouTube clips from Spring Break in Florida. “Who needs Girls Gone Wild,” he asked, “when you have mobile phones with YouTube?”
On the other hand, he went on to say, the technology also will lead to a proliferation of cell-phone-based news gathering. “A lot of the first news images on the failed car bombings in the United Kingdom came from people with cell phones,” McGuire noted, adding that YouTube is becoming a de facto grassroots news source.
A YouTube-optimized phone might not only multiply the options for user-generated content, such as for grassroots news, but also create distribution options for professionals. YouTube is populated by professionally produced videos as well as amateur-created ones, and “YouTube phones” could open up a new market platform.
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