vTap has released its native S60 client. If you haven’t checked it out yet, I really recommend it. While the graphics leave more than a little to be desired, the operation of the system is brilliant. I’ve used the mobile site before plenty in the past, but having a native S60 app ready to display results at the press of a few buttons absolutely makes vTap one of the most useful features of my phone.
vTap’s main feature seems to be its claim to fame- “videos from everywhere”. The service helps you find media from a ton of sources quickly on your phone. Those sources include news media outlets, user submitted media and of course the perenial favorite of millions, YouTube. vTap claims that a continually growing collection of 200 million videos from thousands of sites is readily and quickly available from the service.
Searches happen the way they should on a service designed for mobile use; when you start typing, results are displayed based on a character-based incremental search. Generally, the entire word or set of words need not be completed to match results. It also takes advantage of T9 to further facilitate ease of use on a mobile device without a qwerty keypad.
While the video searching function of vTap is slick and quite useful in a number of scenarios, what I find to be really cool is the Wikipedia/Wiktionary search. I’m sure we’ve all been sitting around with friends hotly debating some trivial piece of information until someone pulls out a mobile and hits up Wikipedia for (hopefully) the facts and ends the quibble. vTap makes this a quick and simple pleasure by incorperating Wikipedia search into the S60 application. The impromptu abilitly to lookup information on movies and TV, sports, history, people and other various facts has no doubt already saved society more than a few black eyes, and vTap only makes this easier and quicker. The Wiktionary search allows you to look up spelling, meaning and pronounciation with complete ease and without the need to open up a web browser. Simply select ‘Wikipedia’ from the options menu inside the app and you’re ready to start entering a search. Quick and simple, no fuss. Wiktionary results are only English for right now- but we’re told that additional languages will be coming soon.
Another very slick item is the playlist and feed feature. When you sign up for a (free) account at vTap, which can be done relatively easily right from your phone, you get the ability to create your own playlist of previously watched videos. You can also customize feeds to display videos in your main screen that are of interest to you. There’s a recommendation bit as well that, I would assume, bases results upon what you’ve been watching and what’s in your feed- much like TiVo does for TV at home or LastFM does for your music listening enjoyment. Great new features from an already great service, features that I can only guess will continue to be built upon- unlike previous video clip streaming favorites from the likes of EmTube and MobiTubia.
As well as all of these features, there’s also plenty of options such as video quality settings, ‘audio only’ if you’re just interested in listening to a news report or some music from one of the thousands of sources. The app can connect to WiFi or 3G- so if you don’t have an unlimited data account from your provider… you’ll want to be very aware of how you’re connecting to the network. ;)
Have a go with it yourself and let us know how you think it compares to some of the other video streaming apps available out there. The S60 client can be downloaded here- or you can just visit m.vtap.com on your moblie where you will be presented with a link for your specific device.
Update: There’s definitely a lot of talk here and elsewhere questioning the whole “Videos from Everywhere” tagline. Many users feel that far too many of the search results are fetched from YouTube. This will clearly and obviously be the case when you search for media that is likely to reside on YouTube- viral videos, product reviews, video blogs, etc- and that makes sense; YouTube has a massive collection of videos… somewhere around 75 million. So yeah, it’s very possible that you’ll fetch quite a few YouTube videos if you search for something that’s likely to have been posted there. That’s a pretty obvious result of YouTube’s immense catalog.
However, if you have a search for something such as political or financial news, or sports clips, you’re very likely to find that most of your results in fact *aren’t* going to be from YouTube. Punch in “Palin” or “Wall Street” and you’ll see what I mean. The example of “Palin” for a current event search yields videos from the following; The New York Times, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, CBS News, ABC News, *many* CNN results, Associated Press, MSN Video, USATODAY.com, MySpace, Local News8, FunnyorDie… and yes, even a few YouTube videos- but hardly anywhere near as many sources as that of the news outlets. This also makes perfect sense.
To better illustrate this fact with some numbers, I’m told by Daren Gill of vTap that they indeed have crawled over 100,000 sites to date for video content and the index is somewhere around 220 million videos. On a daily basis, vTap indexes over 7,000 of the most dynamic sites to order to keep the content current.
My point is that it’s hardly fair to say that search results are mostly YouTube in origin. It just depends on what you’re looking for. ;)
IMHO, there’s no reason to dink around with the YouTube app when I can use something that brilliantly covers YouTube and so many other sources. If you set the media quality to ‘high’, I think you’ll find that the quality matches, and in some cases depending upon the source, surpasses the quality you’ll find from the YouTube app or the others.
