Wap Review

YouTube's mobile site offers the full catalog of videos from the desktop YouTube site. The latest update (released August 6, 2009) adds social sharing features and direct video uploading. 

You need to login  to access to the new capabilities which include the ability to post comments on videos, share videos with other YouTube users or by Email, add videos to my favorites or to a playlist, rate videos and browse the phone's file system to find and upload videos directly from my phone (top images). Direct uploading is dependent on your phone browser supporting the html "input" tag's "file" attribute, which almost all smartphones and many (especially Nokia and Sony Ericsson) feature phones do. If uploading using the YouTube mobile site doesn't work from your phone, you can upload phone videos to YouTube using MMS or Email by following these instructions.

I'm impressed with YouTube's approach to mobile. It is one of the very few video sites I've seen that has thematically consistent URLs across all devices and browsers. That means that any YouTube video URL is device independent and will work in any mobile or desktop browser. I can click on a link to a video on a mobile or desktop site or in Bloglines or Google Reader on my phone or on the desktop and the video will be delivered in a format appropriate for what even device or browser I'm using. It just works and means I can safely share YouTube links without having to worry about the context (iPhone, Opera Mini, S60 Browser, feature phone browser or desktop) that they will be viewed in.

 

Depending on who is doing the counting, DailyMotion is either the number two or three user generated video sharing site (after YouTube) in terms of traffic. 

The Dailymotion mobile site lets you search or browse though  videos in subject area "channels" Or you can jump right into the "Most viewed", "Most recent", "Most popular" and "Best Rated" lists. It looks like the mobile site only contains a subset of the videos on the desktop site though.  I was unable to find many of the videos that are on the main site.

The streaming (there is no download option) videos are in a rather low quality, low resolution (176x144) format even on phones that are capable of handing much larger and higher quality content like my Nokia N95. The only exception seems to be the iPhone which has a dedicated URL, iphone.dailymotion.com with full screen 480px wide videos.

You do not need to register to watch any of the videos.  If you have an account you can log in to view your favorites and profile.

The only mobile upload option is with Shozu.  Which is a great program, provided your phone supports it. It would be nice to see other mobile upload options like MMS, email and browse for file.

View Qik videos on your phone. OIK is a video streaming and sharing app for Symbian, iPhone, Windows Mobile, Maemo, Android, BlackBerry and some Sony Ericsson Java phones. Qik Mobile allows viewing of Qik streams and uploads on almost any video capable phone.

Mobile edition of video and audio search engine Blinkx.  Blinkx draws from over 750 content sites and claims to have indexed 4000 years of content.  The mobile site lets you browse popular Blinkx categories or do a keyword search.  Videos on Blink Mobile download rather than stream.  They are rather big files at 640x360px and several megabytes in size.  The ones I tried looked and played great on an HTC Evo Android phone but only the audio portion worked on a Nokia N95-3.  I'm not sure why as they are H264 encoded in an MP4 package which the Nokia should support.

Yamgo provides free streaming TV and prerecorded video to iPhone, Android, Symbian and other mobile phones. You do need to register to use Yamgo but registration is instant, requires only an email address and you can done without leaving the mobile site.

The service is UK based and many of the live streams including World Cup play by play are only available in the UK. Here in the US, only three live channels are listed and only one of those, the Outdoor Sport Channel actually worked. 

I had better luck with the pre-recorded videos, all the ones I tried played well on both a Nokia N95 and an HTC Evo Android phone.  Content is mainly sports, especially soccer. There are also a number videos covering environmental issues from Greepeace and the WWF. Source: Mobility.mobi

Launched last April as both a web site and a mobile site, San Francisco based startup Kyte.tv combines video with social networking. With Kyte you create a homepage, which Kyte calls a channel, and add video, images, text and music from your PC or phone. Anyone can visit your channel, and view the content you have shared. Registered users can leave comments, live chat with you and other users and participate in polls. Channels can be embedded on a MySpace page or blog and there's a Facebook app too.

Kyte was designed for mobile from the start, giving it a advantage over sites like YouTube, MySpace and Facbook which have had to graft a mobile web front end on to something that was created with no awareness of the mobile web. I've blogged about Facebook, MySpace and Friendster's mobile sites and they all have have a raft of usability issues most of which are related to their initial implementation as a web only services.

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vTap is another of the many sites offering streaming video for mobile phones. vTap launched in September as a downloadable application for Windows Mobile devices which is still available. Then came an Ajax powered iPhone version. I don't have an iPhone, but if you do try vTap.com. The iPhone version has some neat features like predictive text search where the site completes words as you type and RSS news feeds that spontaneously appear to help you pass the time while your video is being buffered in the slow ATT Edge network.

The big news for WapReview though, is that vTap has just launched a mobile web version of the site at m.vtap.com. The mobile site lacks the flashy features of the iPhone app but should work on any phone capable of streaming 3gpp video. I tried vTap using a Nokia N95 and was pleased with the site's clean and efficient design and large selection of content. vTap is a primarily a video search engine which does real-time encoding of video from web formats like Flash to mobile friendly 3gpp.
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Indie Hip-Hop, Rock, Metal and R&B music videos. RagTube features over 3500 indie artists. Billed as an iPhone site, I had no trouble using it on an Android HTC Magic and with Opera Mobile 10 on Symbian. The high quality 480x320 mpeg4  average 10 MB in size. Source: Mobility.mobi

Vuclip (which used to be called Blueapple.mobi), is a video search engine. It searches and indexes over 150 million videos from sites like YouTube, MetaCafe and Versaly. I was able to find videos for almost every query I tried including music videos, TV shows and sports.

Vuclip uses browser detection to deliver files are optimized for almost any video capable phone.  Formats range from low bandwidth 176x144, H263, AMR, 3gp, split into 500KB, 1 minute segments for low end devices to high quality, 320x240 5 MB .mov files for the iPhone.

TinyTube.net is an independent mobile site that hosts 3gp versions of a lot of the current content on YouTube, MySpace, MetaCafe, Blip, Veoh and FileCabi.net, Rever and a number a number of other sites. . The videos are searchable and can be browsed by category and sorted by newest, Most Popular, Highest Rated or Longest. TinyTube can deliver streaming site or downloadable video in low or high quality. Both qualities are 176x144 with varying degrees of compression and of course size - low quality averages 300KB, High 2MB.

Tubidy is a new mobile front end to YouTube.  Browse or search for videos from your country or globaly.  Videos are converted to 3gp format for compatibility with most any phone that supports video playback and download. Low and high quality versions of each video are available and there is an option to download videos spit into 1 minute pieces for devices or networks that limit download size.

A collection of streaming rock video channels featuring various genres like Metal, Progressive, 70's, 80's and 90's. Videos are in Windows Media format. Usability is hampered by the site's use of an almost unreadable combination of gray text on a black background.

Teli.mobi is one of the larger directories of mobile formatted streaming video sites. It has links to hundreds of video services organized into categories including News, Sport, Music, Movies, Kids, Religious, Webcams and Weather Radar. The site is targeted at Windows Mobile devices and most of the linked videos are in Windows Media formats which are also supported by many Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Sprint CDMA devices.

Mogg allows mobile users to upload, share, tag, and download videos from and to mobile phones. Videos also have an option to stream, labeled "Watch" which is non-functional on my N95 and Android phones. Downloading works.  Content includes lots of movie trailers

OVGuide is a categorized directory of mobile video sites. Categories include auto racing, entertainment shows, and viral clips

Download free videos from YouTube, MetaCafe, DailyMobile and other online sites. Source Oh! Mobile Directory

The UK's Channel 4 public TV offers a variety of streaming video clips including comedy, documentaries and movie reviews.  Must are free but some cost 50p.

Free movie trailers in streaming or downloadable hi and low res 176x144 3gp or downloadable 320x190 mp4 formats.  Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Alternate mobile front end to YouTube.  Browse and search for videos YouTube.  Each video is available in a choice of four formats; streaming low quality 176x144 and downloadable higher quality 176x144, QVGA mpeg4 or QVGA .flv. Source: Tappity

Browse and search mobile formatted videos on YouTube and Blip.tv. Source: Tappity

Showboxx is a mobile entertainment community - a stage for your pictures and videos. Show us your talent in various voting topics, become a star and win super prizes. Express yourself! Source: Oh! Mobile Directoy

A mobile web portal whose main attraction is a directory of over 1,000 mobile video and audio streams in Windows Media format.  Today PDA also features news, stocks, weather, a few wap games, chat room and a mobile site directory. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Searchable directory of mobile formatted tv and radio streams plus a language translator and a webapp that lets you create password protected temporary notes which self destruct after 24 hours. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Microsoft has added a page of mobile videos to the MSN Mobile portal. There are several thousand videos available including News, Sports, Music Videos and Movie trailers. You can follow the Mobile Video link on mobile.msn.com or go directly to the video page at video.mobile.msn.com. The videos are 240x340 px in size for Windows mobile devices and 176 x 144 px for most other supported phones. They average about two minutes in length and are available as high or low quality streams or as downloadable files.

The site doesn't work with all video capable phones yet. MSN is only offering videos to devices that they have tested and verified compatibility with. For now you may see the the message "We currently do not support Video on your device" and be unable to watch the videos. Testing is proceeding rapidly and MSN's goal is to eventually support 90% of video capable 3G phones world wide.

The MSN Mobile video site is one of the better ones in terms of variety and quality of videos and ease of use. There's timely coverage from NBC and MSNBC News and ABC Sports along with all sorts of entertainment clips and user generated and viral content for sources like StupidVideos.com. The NBC clips include Nighty News items and interviews from Meet the Press.

A new mobile media (videos and images) sharing site. Anyone can browse, download and view. Register at www.zannel.com to be able to upload which can be done by MMS or on the PC site.

Download images, full track music .mp3's and videos (currently .flv only but more mobile friendly formats are coming soon.)

Mobile movie previews. This site has dozens of streaming videos including trailers for recent movie releases, TV show previews and video game demos. The videos are in the 144x176px h263 format which is supported by almost all modern phones.

Break Mobile (m.break.com) Break.com is a popular online video site featuring humorous user generated videos in the style of TV show "America's Funniest Home Videos". Users can indicate their approval or disapproval of a video by clicking a thumbs up or thumbs down icon with cash prizes awarded to the most popular videos. The videos are in the lowest common denominator 176x144 H263 format, meaning low quality but they will work on virtually any video capable phone.

Search for and download videos in mobile formats from Google Video. These are high quality .mp4 and .avi videos (5-15MB) so you really need a 3G connection. Avi support is pretty much limited to Windows Mobile. The mp4 format files are smaller and work on more devices.

MyWaves is a major new and well funded mobile video sharing site featuring thousands of videos organized into channels. The content is very YouTube like - a blend of user-submitted amateur videos and professional offerings from the likes of ABC, CNN, Nike, MTV and HBO. If you register, which requires a mobile phone number, you can create your own public or private channels. Registration is not required to view any of the thousands of public channels. If you are wary about giving out you real mobile number any 10 digit number seems to work. MyWaves also has a Java Me application which can be downloaded at www.mywaves.com/p/d - however all it does is launch the MyWaves mobile web site in the phones default browser!

Another mobile video download site. All videos are available as .3gp, .mp4 and real formats. The .mp4 videos seem be smaller than the .3gp ones which doesn't make sense as .mp4 is higher quality and always has a larger file size. Not surprisingly, I couldn't get any of the the .mp4's to play.

Mobile FilmMakers 2006 (wap.mobifilms.net) This is a mobile site created for a mobile filmmaking contest held in 2006. The site has about a dozen films available for viewing in 176x144 h263/aac format including the four winning films. There are also film making tutorials available in text or video format.

The ultimate streaming video site for Windows Mobile users with over 300 channels to choose from, everything from news to sports to music neatly categorized. Too bad it's all Windows media content mot 3gpp or mpg4 which would work on a much wider range of mobile devices.

YourVids (yourvids.mobi/) is a mobile video and photo sharing site. Anyone can view the .3gp format videos, free registration is required to upload. Registration only asks for an email address NOT your mobile number which is as it should be. YourVids also emphasizes the social, members can create profiles, message and chat. Some of the photos and videos on YourVids are mildly NSFW.

Here's another mobile web site that lets you download videos from YouTube, Google Video, DailyMotion and MetaCafe to your phone. It's called MyMobileClips and works a little differently than TinyTube which I reviewed a week ago.

To use the mobile service you have to register at the MyMobileClips.com PC site. Don't be put off by the fact that you seem to be registering for a phpBB Forum. There is a forum but that's not the main purpose of the site. I think MyMobileClips leveraged the robust registration and email verification facilities in phpBB to get the site up quickly. That's in keeping with the rest of MyMobileClips which has the look of a quick, clever and very functional hack.

Once you are registered you can download any YouTube, Google, DailyMotion or Metacafe Video either to your PC for sideloading or directly to your phone at wap.mymobileclips.com. Unlike TinyTube, access to videos on MyMobileClips isn't immediate. You request the video and MyMobileClips retrieves it and converts it to mobile format. This process takes about 5 minutes. Your converted videos remain available for you to download for 24 hours.

The PC interface is barebones, you just paste in the url of the video from YouTube or one of the other video sites and enter an arbitrary password. MyMobileClips gives you a short pin number. You can retrieve your downloaded video later by entering the password and pin.

Unlike the mobile versions of most PC sites, the MyMobileClips wap site is more full featured than it's big brother. Instead of entering a video's url - which would be very tedious on a phone - you can browse YouTube and MetaCafe videos or you can search YouTube, MetaCafe or Google videos. Searches return descriptions and optionally thumbnails. Speaking of options, you can specify all sorts of parameters such as video size (128x96 or 176x144), frames/per second, bitrate, mono or stereo sound, and 3gp (h263) or mp4 encoding.

I won't say that the MetaCafe mobile UI is slick or particularly easy to use. Pages are long - there's a lot more scrolling than I like. If you want to view the thumbnails you have to click a link after the page has already loaded forcing a time wasting reload. But no other mobile video site has the power and flexibility of MyMobileClips or makes the entire library of YouTube plus three other Major video sharing sites available on your phone, PDA or portable media player. If the UI gets to be too much, a link near the top of the mobile home page lets you download videos that you had queued in advance on the PC site.

Nice mobile video sharing site. Content seems to be almost 100% real user generated. Most of the videos are created with camera phones and are short, 10 seconds or so, and around a 100 KB in size.

Reuters has one of the best mobile news sites at mobile.reuters.com. Now there is also Reuters Labs, labs.reuters.com which has 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 stated) installed. 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.

Update: Reuters Mobile Videos is out of the labs. Links to selected videos appear on the Reuters mobile News homepage. The video home page is at /mobile.reuters.com/mobile/m/Video. Unfortunately the only format offered seems to be Windows Media! Far more devices support .3gpp than Windows Mobile Video making it a strange choice if only one format is to be supported.

Cinee presents a new mobile video clip every Thursday. The videos are relatively small around 150 KB and 176x144 and are mpeg4/amr encoded so they should be compatible with most video capable phones.

Sean Berner tipped me about his mobile streaming video site ZooVision. It's pretty neat and to me represents the begining of a trend - off portal streaming video. But first a disclaimer, I don't have a phone that is capable of handing streaming media - so this review is based on browsing ZooVision and similar sites on a PC along with some Googling. If you want to click through to these sites and check out the videos yourself on a PC you'll need the latest versions of RealPlayer, QuickTime and Windows MediaPlayer.

ZooVision is quite nicely done and features a lot of free mobile streaming video content attractively presented and conveniently organized. There are three featured news clips from the Associated Press - News, Business and Entertainment - which are updated daily (second image). Other content includes 20 episodes of a video podcast called the 'The Blachole', and lots of Music Videos, Anime clips, Movie Trailers, and classic cartoons like Popeye, Little Lulu and Superman. Most of the content is short - 1 or 2 minutes, although the Blachole Vodcast I watched was quite long - 15 minutes - way too long to hold my interest. The videos come in three formats although the majority are 120 x 160 3gp. There are some Windows Media videos that are in larger 240 x 320 format and are noticeably higher in quality and three "3G Demos" which are encoded with the latest h264 codec. The h264 clips didn't work with any of the players on my PC although my version of QuickTime Player claims to support h264.

According to Sean as well as users on HowardForums, the ZooVision videos work with a variety of phones and carriers including:

• Cingular's LG CU500 (HSDPA), Samsung ZX10 (W-CDMA), and even Edge phones like the SonyEriccson w600 and Z500a and Nokia 6620, 6230 and 6270
• Sprint's MM (multi-media) series phones - EVDO units like the Samsung NMM-A920 and the LG Fusic and also 1-RTT devices like the Sanyo MM-8300
• compatabile phones on T-Mobile US but only with the $20-30/month "web" plan, not with the cheaper T-Zones.
• Samsung D600 (GPRS!) on Orange UK and the Samsung A920 (EVDO) on Fido Canada.

No joy for non-Windows Mobile Verizon customers however, as the Brew media player onV-Cast phones only plays content with Verizon specific DRM.

This site features 300+ links to streaming video and audio news and sports broadcasts from services like the BBC, Eurosport, Al Jazzera and CNN. About half the content is in English. The video links are all in 320 x 240 Windows Media format. the audio content is also mainly Windows Media but some are in more open formats like MP3 or Ogg Vorbis.

Sony Ericsson has launched this mobile video site featuring five new free music and comedy videos each week.  You can also enter a music trivia contest to win a Sony Ericsson W995 Walkman phone with 8 MP camera.  There's a new contest and winner each week. Source: Mobility.mobi

Jan-2010: Site is down.

Nicely designed site with a variety of user submitted news, tech sports and travel videos in 176x144 .3gp format. I enjoyed the ones taken by someone wandering around the big 3GSM trade show in Barcelona earlier this year. Anyone can download, you must register to submit videos. Registration can be done on the phone or on MyCorner's PC web site and requires giving your mobile phone number. As far as I know MyCorner is reputable but I advise against giving your number to anyone you aren't personally acquainted with. It only takes a phone number to perpetrate a premium SMS scam.

Jan 2010: Site is down

YouTube competitor emphasizing humorous videos. Some of the videos are user submitted while others are made for the site. On the web, StupidVideos.com lets users comment on and upload videos but the mobile site is view-only. The videos are in .3gp format (176x144, h263 encoded with mono amr audio) which is the lowest common denominator of mobile video formats and should work on just about any mobile phone that can download video from the open internet. They will not work on BREW carriers like Verizon, Alltel and US Cellular which block all off-portal content downloading.

21-Jun-2010: Displays an error page with the message: "The site is currently unavailable; please contact the system administrator."

A video blog or vblog, RocketBoom, presents a three-minute daily news report emphasizing technology and the arts. The stories, presented in a gossipy style by anchor, Amanda Congdon Joanne Colan, are actually pretty interesting. Rocketboom seems to be carrying on pretty well without Amanda . RocketBoom's mobile streams are hosted by MoveDigital.com which has it's own MoveDigital Mobile Site (seee below) with hundreds of mobile videos.A video phone supporting .3gp files is required to see the videos.

21-Jun-2010: Site is down

 

Search and browse a catalog said to contain millions of videos from YouTube, DailyMotion and MetaCafe and other sites and view them on your phone .  Join Jump2Video's social network to  chat, share photos and videos and find friends.

21-Jun-2010: Site is down