YouTube Coming Soon To Cellphones

Krishna Dagli writes to mention a short New York Times article about a deal between Verizon and Google. YouTube will be coming to Verizon's VCast service. There's lots of catches: It's a $15/month fee, and you don't gain access to all of the content YouTube has to offer. Just the same, the article makes Google out to be thinking along these lines; YouTube may start showing up in many different places. From the article: "'Everybody carries a phone with them, but they may not have a computer,' said Steve Chen, chief technology officer and a co-founder of YouTube. People can 'take the phone out of their pocket while waiting for the bus' and watch a video, he added. Verizon Wireless and YouTube said the service would be available early next month. The companies would not discuss the financial terms of their deal but said Verizon would have the exclusive rights to distribute YouTube videos on mobile phones 'for a limited period of time.'"

nickle and diming

[Speare]

Verizon?

If they routinely break phone features like user-mp3 so they can charge money for crappy ringtones, what kind of charge would there be for downloading a whole video? When I got my phone last year, even the little "wallpaper" background images were for-pay, and if you switched from image A to image B to image A, you'd have to buy image A twice! Who in their right minds would pay-per-view for 92x64 bitmaps?

copyright?

[gEvil (beta)]

With Verizon now charging users to access content contained on YouTube, doesn't that open the door even wider regarding charges of copyright infringement? Now that money is being exchanged for the service, it seems that copyright owners could now go after Verizon (and Google) for selling copyrighted material that isn't theirs to sell.

Yawn

[tacokill]

So, for $15, I get to stream amateur videos to my cell phone?

How about, instead, I stream my own videos to myself using Orb [orb.com] and along with that, I can hit some online TV broadcasts, some internet radio, and prolly my mp3 collection (haven't tried that yet). And oh yea, one last thing: it's $0.

But yea, this Verizon/Youtube thing is cool too.