There was much chatter last week about Verizon’s new deal with YouTube, which boils down to a highly sanitized service offering a small selection of videos chosen as “safe” by a highly conservative corporation - and all for $15 a month.
Nice try People, but I don’t think you’ll see much of an uptake, despite the headlines. The value in YouTube lies in lots of areas, but having the equivalent of your Grandma selecting the “best” for you to look at on your phone and charging a significant premium for the privilege is not part of the winning proposition.
In the meantime, our friends at Orb have cracked the problem for those that need a YouTube fix (and have a fixed price data plan, it goes without saying). As you’ll probably remember, Orb are the people who allow you to view content that’s already on your PC, on your mobile by downloading a free application onto your computer. They’re a kind of Slingbox, without the box, which is pretty cool.
Orb’s new interface will allow you to search video on YouTube, Daily Motion, Google and Yahoo from your mobile, including by meta tag, top rated, most viewed, recently added, user name and user name favorites. In other words, you can find stuff you and your mates like, unedited and independently of what Granny might think you should be looking at.
As for Verizon, the days of the walled garden are over and trying to extend this kind of thinking to other new products is doomed, I’m afraid. You can change now, or wait for market forces to make you act. And I’d always recommend companies lead rather than follow.
I completely agree Russel. We are in the final days of walled gardens and spoon-fed, sanitized content. Your article has persuaded my to sign up to 3’s new price-plan. I just wish they had a quad-band handset with a full keyboard (but I’m probably being fussy).
I heard that Orb isn’t compatible with iTunes though, so its service is a bit limiting. Do you think Orb will start licensing their service to the telcos for their music stores?
Hope to catch up soon. All the best,
marc
Too bad youtube went the specific carrier. I hoped they would have opened it up for everyone, just as they did with the website, but obviously they are going after the bucks even more now. Until then I guess we will depend on other websites to offer up youtube videos for mobile phones.
Who’s to say that YouTube won’t force Orb to shut down, to protect their lucrative agreement with Verizon? I featured Tinytube.net, which offered mobile YouTube, a few weeks ago. Its programmer was eventually asked to shut the site down (at least temporarily) for apparent Terms of Service violations.
hey rico
short answer is that the way orb works is, if you can play content on your PC, you can stream that content from your PC to whatever web-enabled device you’re on AWAY from your PC when you want to enjoy that some content, with the orb software *on your own PC* transcoding the content on the fly into the right file format, bitrate, and screen rez for your accessing device. there’s no alternate/secondary copy of the file being stored anywhere. this isn’t a rival broadcast solution - it’s mycasting, from you to yourself.
and hey bdogg - i was actually unsurprised, if disappointed as a user and for the space itself, at how youtube’s verizon deal was yet another walled-garden broadcast attempt on mobile (an outmoded model that the EU carriers like our partners vodafone, 3, and orange have already abandoned). clever of youtube to get verizon to foot the bill (if that’s what’s happening) for the production and programming costs of getting some of youtube onto verizon. OUR solution, of course, is very skype-like in that the *user’s own infrastructure* does the production work for that specific user - no add’l cost to the content provider OR the carrier. so from our standpoint, verizon and all the other carriers really ought to follow the EU carriers’ lead and just have folks download Orb onto their PCs to do the work FOR them!
marc - just about the only content you can’t mycast to yourself through Orb out of the box is iTunes *purchased* content because Apple’s so-called FairPlay DRM doesn’t have a licensing program like The Borg does for WMDRM (i have to say that Msft is actually providing a platform for an ecosystem with their DRM, whereas Apple…)