Top video-sharing web site “YouTube” announced its expansion plans and offered its latest mobile specific features for its users this week. These new features of ‘You Tube’ include an added access to a large catalog of mobile videos. Most of the features like this were available as the desktop versions only until recently.
Mobile devices users will find these new additions at ‘YouTube’ and would be able to choose from tens of millions of videos, according to the company. However, users are required to have a ‘streaming-capable mobile phone device with 3G technology’. This is a necessary requirement for matching the compatibility with the high-speed data access over cellular networks. Many of such popular cellular networks including the U.S. carriers Alltel, AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon Wireless have all rolled out 3G networks capable of supporting ‘streaming capable multimedia phones’.
Users of the Apple iPhone have an added advantage with the in built facility of this type. Apple’s popular iPhone comes with a preloaded YouTube application. The iPhone on the other side has no support for the ‘3G Technology’. Because of this inability, the video-streaming experience can be sluggish at times for the iPhone users. However, the streaming becomes much faster over Wi-Fi connections.
In addition to these expanded mobile offering, YouTube also have been enabled to have an access to their accounts, favorites, videos, channels, and directly upload and share content from mobile phones. You Tube has also facilitated its users with an extended ability to rate and post comments on the go.
With an alternative option to users,’ YouTube for Mobile’ is also available to its users as a free downloadable Java application for a limited number of mobile phones. This is going to become an altogether different and more interactive experience, said YouTube.
At present, the ‘beta application’ is only supported on ‘Java-enabled J2ME MIDP2 mobile phones’ with streaming video capabilities. YouTube says that such type of mobile phone devices include some very popular brand models like the ‘Sony Ericsson K800’ and W880, and the ‘Nokia E65, N95, N73, 6110 Navigator, and 6120 Classic’. YouTube has also entered in to partnerships with some other popular brands including Helio, LG Electronics, Motorola, Nokia, and others in order to enable the users with its video-sharing application on mobile phone devices.
The youth-oriented mobile virtual network operator and service provider ‘Helio’ launched a YouTube application on its ‘Ocean mobile phone’ in the month of December last year. ‘Helio’ also provided a comprehensive YouTube experience to its subscribers. It facilitates its customers and existing subscribers to capture video on the ‘Ocean’. The user can now easily upload the captured videos to YouTube.