YouTube coming on Verizon cell phones

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Today’s edition of the New York Times reveals that the popular video sharing service YouTube is coming to some cell phones. To be precise the newspaper reports that the V Cast subscribers will be able to see the most popular videos.

It is presumed, according to sources close to the negotiations, that Verizon will allow the user to choose between 50 to 100 videos. It’s not clear how those videos will be selected but certainly Verizon will consider carefully the copyrights of every single video.

The service will be available starting from next month and will require the customer to pay a $15 monthly fee for Vcast. The subscribers will also be able to use a streamlined process to upload their own videos. They just need to use a five-digit code instead of having to deal with e-mails.

The deal, announced today between YouTube and Verizon Wireless, does not appear to be exclusive. This means that if this collaboration is successful we can expect to see videos on other cell phones in the future.

For now Verizon gets the advantage and, according to the company executives, this move should definitively increase subscriptions to its mobile media service. Right now in fact only about 10 percent of the customers with phones that support Vcast have subscribed to the service.

Even though the financial details of the deal were not revealed this seems also a good move for Google. This is the first big distribution agreement made by the company after they bought YouTube for more than $1.7 billion. Google secured also a competitive advantage on MySpace, the Microsoft content sharing service that will debut in the future on mobile phones.