Youtube+teams+up+with+Verizon

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Youtube which is now owned by Google is hoping to expand beyond computers into the phone industry. This is crazy. After taking over Youtube and making deals with corporations like CBS to flood video sharing sites with corporate publications, now they want to flood our cell phones. Will this really increase subscriptions for Verizon wireless. Well they did say that they will be delivering Youtube clips to cell phones in their attempts to "increase" subscriptions. But so far only a small minority of U.S. consumers use features like video on their cell phones. Verizon Wireless hopes the huge popularity of many home videos shown on YouTube can help boost use of its Vcast wireless media service. "The user-generated content space is a very important sector in media," said Robin Chan, marketing director at Verizon Wireless, who believes the deal could help increase its service revenue. (Riiight) Under the YouTube agreement, consumers who pay a $15 monthly fee for Vcast will be able to use their cell phones to view consumer-generated content posted on YouTube's Web site (artstechnica 2006). Chan also said customers would also be able to post videos from their phones to YouTube more easily than before by using a five-digit short code instead of an e-mail address. Verizon said about 20 million of its customers have phones that could support Vcast. . YouTube, which gets more than 100 million views of its videos a day, is exploring whether it can integrate YouTube into a variety of handheld devices with Internet connections. "Mobile is just one of the things we're looking at," said YouTube's co-founder, Steve Chen. With this media integration ever since Google's buying of Youtube what do you think Youtube and Google will be looking at?

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Source: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061128-8301.html