Tuesday | February 07, 2012
Tech Lover’s Guide to YouTube On-Demand
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By
Dave Mathews
6 August 2007
If you are like many of the students that I speak to, you have a handful of LCD displays around you – on your mobile phones, iPods, laptops and other assorted gadgets. That being said, you probably have no desire to own or watch traditional television. For the Facebook-addicted, iTunes-loving generation, television is "too push" and YouTube has become your source for on-demand "video snacking."
Gone are the days of watching whole shows; it’s now about enjoying the relevant content. The generation of fast-food dinner consumers has their own brand of fast-consumption video content and this audience justified Google paying $1.65 billion for the video site in the fall of 2006.
This being said, when you are ready to buy a high definition television (HDTV), watching YouTube videos on your laptop may not be the best way to enjoy the content for either a "rich experience" or access to these videos on the go. Fortunately, there are now a handful of products that provide YouTube content on screens other than your PC. This is not the first time that there has been a battle for data connected devices in the living room. Many, other than video game consoles, have failed in the market but none had supported YouTube until now.
Wireless TV
The first product to allow YouTube content on a television was the NETGEAR EVA8000 Digital Entertainer HD ($349). This living room device will also find music, videos and photos on your network PCs or storage devices or even an attached USB thumb drive and display them on a television. Once your PC is running the Digital Entertainer software, you will be able to watch the full library of YouTube videos. Unfortunately, a PC is required to sit in the middle of "the transaction" and decode the video from the YouTube website, and then pass it through your wireless network to the television decoder. This makes the setup a bit more complex, but gives access to the full library of videos within the site.
Apple announced its iTV product at Macworld in January 2007, then released it as the AppleTV in March. This product oozes both physical style and a beautiful on-screen user interface, but is only compatible with HDTV television supporting component or the latest digital HDMI inputs. The internal 40 ($299) or 160 gigabyte ($399) hard drive syncs with your computer running iTunes so you can watch some of your videos, pictures or music with your computer off or out of the house.
Streaming Video
The abiltiy to watch YouTube content, which was enabled by a free software upgrade (version 1.1) in late June of 2007, enables the AppleTV to stream those videos directly from the Internet. It does not require a computer in the middle of the connection to perform the transcoding process, but you will only be able to watch those videos that have been transcoded by the staff at YouTube to the H.264 format – something that is taking place at their discretion. This means that some of your favorite videos you have found on your PC may not be available on the AppleTV immediately. They are working to make more videos available for this platform however.
The most noise in the gadget universe came from the iPhone with its built-in YouTube icon from the home "deck" of the device. Some caveats are that you will need to have your phone connected to a WiFi hot-spot as the AT&T EDGE wireless cellular data service does not provide enough speed to stream a video to the phone without annoying pausing and buffering. You also have a limited subset of videos that you can watch, as this device too only plays compressed video in H.264, like the AppleTV above. With this protocol and the wide 3.5" screen of the iPhone, the quality of videos is first-rate and very nice to watch on the portable device when you are in a wireless hot-spot.
iPod Videos
If you have an iPod with video capability, you too can watch YouTube videos on this 100-million-sold marvel by converting them with a software utility from DVDVideoSoft.com. This program will let you take a video file or web link from YouTube and convert it to a MPEG4 iPod compliant video format. If you have favorite clips, you can also use this utility to convert YouTube videos for the AppleTV and iPhone so that you can watch them when you are not connected to the Internet. Just note that they will take up precious storage space on these devices.
Those of you with high-speed, so-called 3G, mobile phones from Verizon, Sprint or Cingular may be able to watch YouTube content on your mobile phone as well. YouTube quietly launched their mobile portal in June of 2007 through the website m.youtube.com – and it too looks good, albeit on the smaller screens of common 3G phones. You will not have full access to the YouTube library, as this portal uses yet another protocol-3GP-which is optimized for mobile phone video.
You can navigate the site easily through your phone keypad and even enjoy a clip of Tillman, the skateboarding dog. This small-screen experience has its limits but it does put YouTube in your pocket!
Dave Mathews is the "Gadget Guy" living in San Francisco and spending too much time looking for funny videos on YouTube. His website is www.davemathews.com. For Dave’s video review of the AppleTV playing YouTube content, head over to www.youtube.com/gadgetgi.
© 2008, Young Money Media, LLC. All rights reserved.
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