Vtap Native S60 Client Released
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.
I find the video quality to be pretty pathetic. What is the point in finding the video quickly if it is such a poor quality to see and takes forever to load. I would rather see the video on a PC, rather than hurt my eyes. I am doubtful of the “video from everywhere” theme. Mostly all videos for searches I did are from YouTube. The video quality of YouTube’s mobile app is much better.
@Video Watcher – While the video quality is not stellar, it’s roughly what I would expect from any of the typical online video repositories, such as YouTube. Given that, I think vTap accomplishes the goal quite nicely. You’re not going to watch any movies or tv shows this way, but if someone asks ‘did you see that video of ______?’, it’s handy to have at your fingertips to join the conversation.
By default, the app is set to medium quality- did you set it to high quality? I rather find the quality of the video at the high setting to be quite good on the E71 here. It’s a smallish screen, so I’ll try it on the N95 too- but I really don’t find to to be *that* bad…
One new feature was recently added not mentioned here. A very preliminary version of direct video upload and youtube linking — With your youtube userid and password you can:
(a) Capture NOW ie Record a video from your phone and upload it straight to youtube.
(b) You can also browse uploaded videos (public and private) as well as videos you have favorited or channels you’re subscribed to in youtube.
To get to these features you use the Upload Videos on the home page of vTap WebVideos or in Options there is a My Youtube option and another Upload option.
Ah yes- I had overlooked that. Thanks for mentioning it- very slick feature indeed!
Pardon me if I sound naive, uploading to YouTube and logging in to YouTube account were already there in the YouTube’s own mobile app. 80-90% of the video search results in VTap are also from YouTube. Why is there a need for this app at all for video? Apart from providing publicity and traffic to YouTube what else are they doing that is worth talking about separately? Wikipedia and Wiktionary search don’t cut it. May be this a bunch of 2-3 people in a garage trying to do something, but there may be better things to do and leave this video thing to YouTube and Google.
It might appear that most of the search results are YouTube with vTap, but I think that is because the YouTube catalog is so large that it stands to reason that most of the results would be from YouTube. It also depends on what video you’re searching for. If you’re looking for some sort of viral video or other content that is generally associated with YouTube, it’s very likely that search results are going to appear very YouTube centric- but if you’re looking for something like financial news videos, you’ll pull up more results from sources like CNBC and the like. I personally find there to be a large amount of sources other than YouTube- and that’s likely just my usage of the app. I like the feed feature, I have many sources for it set up that aren’t YouTube, so again- I see many results that aren’t YouTube at all. My recommendations are also filled with results mostly *not* from YouTube. I really think it all depends on how you use vTap.
I also happen to very much like the Wikipedia/Wiktionary support, and having all of these things in one just makes sense to me. If that functionality isn’t useful to you and you mostly search for YouTube video- it’s indeed likely to limit the relevance of vTap over YouTube’s own application.
[...] Symbian Guru – vTap S60 client released, search and view video sites [...]
FWIW- I’ve updated at the bottom of the post with some information passed along by Daren Gill of vTap with regards to the claim that it’s mostly YouTube sources. :-)
Given the sampling one can do, out of the 220 Million videos, 210 million videos will be from YouTube. Does this company have the rights to all the other videos it is transmitting around the world? All you need to check is the News page of the company, which is devoid of any content deals (quite the opposite of every other mobile video company). You can’t build a video business with no content rights. Content companies have put videos on their PC web site for consumption on a PC with specific geographical restrictions. Not to be transmitted to mobiles on the other side of the world without their permission. Remember the videos served by VTap are coming from VTap’s servers and not the content owners’ (which may also explain the poor quality).
By saying “dinking around with the YouTube app” you have clearly demonstrated that you have not used it. I encourage you to try it. It is very smooth and is lightyears ahead of vtap in usability and user interface. YouTube mobile app is like Mac OS X compared to the MS-DOS command line look of vtap. When I am on the mobile, I am not interested in seeing Sarah Palin (had enough of her on TV). I want something funky and fun. YouTube has it all. The short format of YouTube nicely fits with the mobile viewing – no expectation of high quality, short, and easy on the wallet on data charges. Good journalism is all about listening to real users.
Hi, YouTube Youth-
While I’m sorry that you think my preference for an app differing from your own doesn’t constitute “good journalism”, I can assure you that I’ve used the YouTube app a great deal. I don’t know why me choosing to use and support an app based on functionality over the looks so clearly demonstrates that I haven’t used the latter in your mind- mostly since it’s absolutely not true.
I think the YouTube app is a very nice looking application, I think it clearly proves that YouTube programmers know what they’re doing with Java- but it’s a little form over function IMO. It’s the same reason I don’t use an iPhone. Sure it’s pretty, sure the UI is a bit nicer than my beloved S60 on a couple of counts, but it doesn’t get the job done *for my needs*. With vTap I can search and instantly start playing back content from, literally, a hundred thousand sources. The YouTube app worked well for me, until the S60 vTap application came along. That’s all I’m trying to say.
I cited Palin and the financial woes in my country as a figure of current events, but I should think you get the idea. My needs for a web video streaming application goes beyond that of watching something ‘funky and fun’. While that works for you, *and I appreciate that it does*, it doesn’t cut it for me. What does cut it for me is being able to view YouTube sources as well as all the others in one application with a decent interface- not the prettiest, but a decent one. The analogy between command line DOS and Mac OS X is a bit out there IMHO… Though, for what it’s worth, I do mention that they’ve got some work to do on the interface, and I’ve heard back from them on that- a new interface is indeed in the works, but for now I think they were placing more attention on functionality- which I think they’ve done a fantastic job with at this point.
In the end, we’ve both “real users” with difference impressions of things- and that’s okay. That’s how this whole thing works. :)
[...] your mobile, it should detect what version you need. I totally dig vTap. Thoughts on S-G from me here if you want to know more about it. It’s not the prettiest app (new interface in the works), but- [...]