YouTube Mobile and Flash Lite 3
Here is a report from Jason spotting a test YouTube Mobile Page. This is particularly interesting because this provides once and for all the YouTube is going mobile.
At the end of last week there was a lot of talk in the blogosphere about the YouTube Mobile site going live and I was looking forward to putting it through it’s paces. I tried it in Firefox (without UA spoofing) and got a blocked message and so I tried it on my N70 and got the same message. I gave up on it but this morning I thought I would try again and was surprised to find that it worked in IE7! It’s still blocked in Firefox and on my N70 but you can see from the image below that the site is actually up and running. I’m not sure what’s going on with the blocking, seems inconsistent to me, why allow IE7 and block Firefox? The site is built in XHTML-MP and the videos are encoded in what looks to be 3GPP. I am looking forward to wasting a few travel hours watching videos on my mobile in the near future.
It is now just a question of when it will be opened up. I could imagine all those mobile data bills going up! On the technical side it seems that this site is not using Flash Video (FLV) like its web-enabled parent. It uses XHTML-MP for the mobile web page itself and 3GPP for the video files. However, here is a scoop from John via Alessandro) posting about Flash Lite 3 with FLV support during the Adobe Mobile presentation at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco.
Michael Singer of InformationWeek writes of an Adobe Mobile presentation at last week’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. There were apparently demos of web video running in Adobe Flash Lite 3. The article offers martial metaphors for Java, but I think these actually offer different types of value… Java Micro Edition (J2ME) is a to-the-metal programming language, while Flash Lite is an abstract services layer above different device types… you can do things in both. Direct programming can reach a lower range of device; sharing code cross-platform, cross-project works easier at the higher level. Development speed and common high-level functionality tend to become more important as time goes on. The video in Flash Lite 3 shows this — Flash Lite 2 uses “device video”, asking the current phone to use whatever codecs it has to play a matching video asset — Flash Lite 3 promises to provide a common “Flash Video” layer across handhelds, and also across laptops. Cutting development costs while increasing audience size… that’s the common ground behind a lot of Adobe initiatives these days.
So will Google change its mind an use FLV again instead of 3GPP? Maybe not if they want to launch soon. Flash Lite 3 is not expected to hit the handsets anytime soon. It will also take time to integrate into the newer generation of mobile handsets.
