Cool Marketing Thoughts

YouTube is going mobile, saying you can now upload videos to YouTube from your phone or PDA. User generated mobile audiovisual content is becoming quite big, even in Belgium where there’s going to be an actual Mobile Film Festival. One thing I wonder about is how long it’s going to take, and even more: how much it will cost you to upload a video of let’s say 2 minutes. I know for sure that in Belgium you won’t have to try it because it’ll take way too much time to make a connection and keep it alive as long as the upload is going. What’s going to happen if you walk around and you’re being switched from one antenna to the other? Will it reset the data transmission or will it reconnect and continue to transmit, and what will the effect be on the video you send? We’ll see, once YouTube expands the agreements they make with mobile carriers. For now it isn’t possible for Belgium, yet.

It’s a bit weird to actually have your users create two different profiles I think. On the one hand it’ll generate truly dedicated users, on the other hand it’s not really user-friendly. Perhaps that’ll change too in the future. It’s the first time I hear about creating a new profile for mobile content for a service you’re already using. Suppose Hotmail or Yahoo would do that too… you’ll lose your overview and the data would become unmanagable, unless you can merge the data afterwards, but that would make it needlessly complicated.

You can now upload videos directly from your phone or PDA to YouTube. All you need is a mobile device that can take video and send MMS messages, and an Internet access or data plan from your service provider. We currently support uploads from Cingular, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon.

To get started, click on “Create Mobile Profile.” Login, or create an account if you don’t already have one. Once you’re logged in, you’ll create a mobile profile to set up the default information for your videos, and then our system will generate the email address where you should send them. This address will be unique to you and your profile, and you can have up to two profiles.

And what about downloading videos to your mobile device? Are the videos going to be ’slimmed’? YouTube doesn’t say anything about that (yet). It would also recquire your mobile device to have a recent Flash player and I can imagine that it might take a while for some videos to be downloaded. Nice move though. If the networks can support the traffic and can offer a smooth and continuous service, I think YouTube might have another boom in content. Citizen Journalism has been taken to the next level, let’s hope it generates some usable content.

On a sidenote, a project called YouTubeTalk (not affiliated with YouTube) is gaining momentum. It looks like an ordinary community forum that adds to the comment function of YouTube. All links from their homepage go directly to YouTube. In 10 days (it launched on May 1st) they gathered 1239 Posts in 118 Topics by 132 Members. Not bad, but I don’t think it’s that useful.