YouTube has been building an HTML 5 mobile version of their site which offers videos in native H.264 format, which if you have paid any recent attention to Apple are both technologies that will render Adobe Flash obsolete. Not a chance mister Jobs, but it is a cool and very clean technology, and very useful especially if you have an iPhone. Check out http://m.youtube.com on your smartphone. I have been testing for a while now and decided to give them some feedback on the project. Really the only complaint I had was that they didn’t have a “New Videos” category under subscriptions. This is a real time saver if you subscribe to say 30+ content providers like I do because it sorts all the videos across all your subs by date. Anyway, within 2 business days, tada a new button titled “New Videos”, pretty cool.
This feature was already in the native iPhone app but with the addition of all the iPhone users out there the iphone specific streaming servers have really taken a beating to the point where 2:00min clips now take 5 min to load if at all during peak times. Enter – m.youtube.com. With it you can select high def, not an option in the native iPhone app, and most importantly it utilizes different servers so it loads wicked fast. So there you have it, faster load times and better resolution video that will play with very little processor demand on H.264 hardware compliant smartphones. my old embedded youtube iPhone icon is now replaced by the new YouTube icon. Yep, they even make you a cute iPhone specific icon if you bookmark it to your homescreen. I have no idea why Apple decided to use an old console TV for that icon in the first place.
