Reuters has one of the best mobile news sites at mobile.reuters.com. Now there is Reuters Labs, labs.reuters.com with two beta mobile applications. The first is a Flash Lite enabled version of Mobile News that runs on unspecified Symbian devices with the Flash Lite player (required Flash version also not mentioned). I haven’t tried it as I don’t have a compatible phone.

The other beta at Reuters Labs, Mobile Videos, is pretty cool. It has a dozen news videos which are updated daily. The emphasis is on business and stocks with separate videos for the US, European and Asian markets. There are also US, European and World news videos. Each file is available in 3gpp, RealOne and Windows Media formats. I don’t think any of these are actually streamable, the whole file has to download before it begins playing. The quality of the reportage, timeliness and variety of formats makes this a great site for news videos and a welcome addition to ZooVision’s AP News videos.

Reuters Mobile Videos: xhtml-mp

Content: Usability:

Another site with an incredible collection of over 1800 Windows Media files is PPCVIDZ.COM. The total includes some audio only files but there are several hundred videos including live TV, music videos and movie trailers. Some of the content on PPCVIDZ requires a subscription ($5/month) but most of the videos are available for free and without registration. PPCVIDZ is designed for Windows Mobile handsets with a QVGA screen and also requires JavaScript to make full use of all the site’s features such as filtering on things like musical genres (rock, country, etc.) and countries of origin for the live TV channels. Actually, I couldn’t get the drop down menus to work with any browser; mobile or desktop, not even IE 6. Maybe they work in Pocket IE. There are also an annoyingly high number of dead links. In spite of these faults there is still a huge quantity of high quality free mobile video content on this site. For now you are pretty much limited to viewing it on a Windows OS device but Microsoft has finally made Windows Media available for licensing by third parties. We are starting to see support for this format on non-Windows devices beginning with the Symbian UIQ Motorola A1000 and A1010.

PPCVIDZ: cHtml

Content: Usability:
Real has a demo site called RealOne Media Guide at www.realnetworks.com/mobile/series60 with more than a dozen videos in Real Media format. The emphasis is on music videos which seem to be a few years old but are of excellent quality. Most Symbian S60 devices either have Real Player installed or available as a free download. As far as I know, there is no Real Media support available on any other platforms.

RealOne Media Guide: xhtml-mp

Content: Usability:

I added these sites to Yeswap.com under Entertainment/Mobile Video where they join the ones reviewed in an earlier post, Off Portal Streaming Video. Gary Lerhaupt of MoveDigital, one of the sites I mentioned in that post, told me about a feature of his site that should be of interest to anyone producing audio or video content. It’s called AutoPublish. You just point AutoPublish at your rss feed (with video and audio enclosures) and MoveDigital scans it hourly and mobilizes each item. In fact that’s what Rocketboom is using to create their mobile site.

For a constantly updated list of mobile video sites please visit the WapReview Directory’s Mobile Video Page.