Katie Fehrenbacher over at GigaOM blogs YouTube, Coming Soon To Your Cell Phone… an inevitable development, but the how is as interesting as the what.
YouTube’s mobile strategy remains unclear, but the company has options. The company could do a carrier deal and work within the carrier deck or go straight to consumer. The company has a relationship with Cingular, though it’s strictly marketing for now, but carriers are way more squeamish about copyright issues than YouTube’s recent acquirer Google. The company can build a WAP site and java client and go off deck — Google has often gone direct to consumer with mobile applications, though has been starting to do a few carrier deals more recently. Mobile YouTube on or off deck could actually dramatically grow wireless data usage, so the carriers will begrudgingly like them no matter what they do.
My perspective: US carriers won’t know what to do with this initially until they figure out ways to monetize it, which could be far off given Google + YouTube = a video version of AdSense that will likely control the advertising model as a mostly closed loop.
On the customer experience side, most US mobile users aren’t asking for video, and are wary of stepping up to higher cost, all-you-can-eat data plans. Additionally, most mass-market devices (and even networks) are ill equipped to handle live or YouTube video on a large scale, resulting in a poor user experience. YouTube (or whatever the future iterations of it will be called) on phones is inevitable, sure, but for now it’s still early days.
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