Mobile GooTube

Interesting post on GigaOm about GooTube over mobile.

Nice idea...but the economics of mobile data are not the almost "free ride" of the 'Net. Clip surfing GooTube on a mobile will cost real money - in the UK at any rate - a Mb a minute at even $0.50 / minute (lower end pricing) adds up fast. I haven't done the economics country by country for this yet, but I'd suspect as a rule its true in most places as mobile economics is still by and large like Telcos were pre Internet as its the economics of closed networks.

Certainly the mobile music download market was ceded to iPods et al in no small measure due to download cost - the term "sticker shock" was invented for this phenomenon

There are also a number of interesting problems with mobile video:

(i) navigating a mobile for complex web content like Gootube is darned clunky
(ii) its a small screen, a lot of the content will need repurposing for mobile. Technologies to repurpose this on the fly (like that from Snell and Wilcox ) are still in early days, but the problem remains that a lot of the content uploaded will still be for larger screens .
(iii) advertising on a mobile is a different experience, its still unclear if the web style works on the mobile - if not, more repurposing.

None of this is insurmountable, but they need surmounting.

But above all, its the money.....