Youtube Offers Custom Player and Other Goodies

July 20, 2007

I was over on Pirillo’s blog and I saw a quick mention of a new video player by Youtube. I logged into my account and, sure enough, they’re announcing a few interesting items. You Youtube’ers will like this.

Custom Player

You can now create a custom Youtube video player. You can give it a custom color scheme. You can also choose between two different styles - one which flashes thumbnails of your other videos along the bottom of the player. The other provides a playlist to the right of your player. Very slick, if you ask me. Unfortunately, they don’t give you free reign. You cannot fine-tune the color scheme using your own color codes. But, this is still a very nice offering.

Select Your Thumbnail

Now instead of Youtube automatically taking the half-way mark of your video and making that the thumbnail for it, they now give you a choice of 3 different points on the video and you can choose the thumbnail you want. Well, 3 options is always better than one.

Youtube Mobile

I’m not sure if this is new or not, but I just ran across it. Apparently you can now access Youtube on your cell phone using Youtube mobile. Now, it won’t work on all mobile phones. You obviously need a phone with internet access. And even then, you need to be using a carrier that will allow it. As you might guess, streaming video isn’t exactly bandwidth friendly, so some phone carriers aren’t friendly for it.

When I went to try it on my Palm Treo, I first got a warning from Youtube saying that it is bandwidth intensive and that I should get an unlimited data plan before using it. Great how Google is looking out for my phone bill. When I tried to play a video, I got greeted by an “Unspecified Error”. How detailed. So, it doesn’t really work on my phone very well. I don’t know whether to blame Youtube, Microsoft (my phone uses Windows Mobile) or Alltel.

YouTube is Where It’s At

The other video sites are important, too, but not to the degree of Youtube. If you are not uploading your videos to Youtube, it is to your own detriment. That is if viewers are your goal.