Thu, 07/08/2010 – 08:11 by Announcing its new, improved mobile HTML5 site yesterday, the
Google Mobile Blog dropped this little bombshell: “YouTube Mobile now receives more than 100 million video playbacks a day.” Astounding.
Far and away the dominant video site online — and certainly in mobile — Google is making a bid to take YouTube beyond apps and into the browser. Various “
reviews” of the m.youtube.com experience say that it’s “hands down” better than the mobile app version. That’s not entirely clear to me but the new HTML5 mobile website is very nicely done.
Google has made no secret of its desire to leverage HTML5 to build rich web applications that mimic the functionality of “native apps” across smartphone platforms. Google is all about scale. But it’s also about the browser too.
A secondary ambition and unstated objective of the new YouTube (as well as all Google’s rich Web apps) is to get people to the browser on mobile devices.
The browser has become for many iPhone users, and Android to some degree too, a “fall back” tool when there’s no app to address the need in question. That “culture” and behavior isn’t great for Google. Even though search is planted squarely on the homescreen on Android devices, it’s in a subordinate position on the iPhone — a “second choice” after apps.
By building rich HTML5 apps for smartphones Google can achieve its objective of avoiding Apple’s approval process as well as “scaling” across platforms — and equalizing other platforms with the iPhone, which holds a significant app advantage. Indeed, in a very subtle way, Google’s HTML5 strategy seeks to shift the focus of the user experience from apps back to the browser and build a culture of mobile Internet usage similar to the one it dominates on the PC.
