Apple
just announced that it will deploy a special application to enable Youtube to stream video content directly to iPhones over Wi-Fi or EDGE networks:
"iPhone delivers the best YouTube mobile experience by far," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "Now users can enjoy YouTube wherever they are—on their iPhone, on their Mac or on a widescreen TV in their living room with Apple TV."
To achieve higher video quality and longer battery life on mobile devices, YouTube has begun encoding their videos in the advanced H.264 format, and iPhone will be the first mobile device to use the H.264-encoded videos. Over 10,000 videos will be available on June 29, and YouTube will be adding more each week until their full catalog of videos is available in the H.264 format this fall.
The combination of H.264-encoded videos plus iPhone's built-in Wi-Fi networking, stunning 3.5 inch display, and custom YouTube application with its multi-touch user interface results in the best YouTube experience on any mobile device.
Last week at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, Jobs announced that the Safari web browser would now run natively in Windows. Safari supports HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SVG and Java -- meaning web-enabled applications written to those standards will largely be available for iPhone.
By integrating tightly with Youtube video, and by making Safari stretch across Macintosh and Windows and iPhone, Apple is making a statement: the new device from Cupertino will be anywhere multimedia and network content will be.
(Except Vermont, and anywhere AT&T Wireless isn't available. But that's a different story.)
