Murali Aravamudan

Breaking: The "Walled Garden" of Video on Mobile Phones is Smashed: Tens of Millions of Videos Play on Mobile Phones as vTap Goes Live


Tens of millions of video clips, organized by one of the Web's "most comprehensive" video search engines, are now available on the Apple iPhone and on Microsoft Mobile-powered phones, through a thin application downloaded to a mobile browser.

vTap is an offering of Veveo, a Boston-area mobile that has received some $28 million in funding. The company will extend the range of the phones that play videos with the upcoming release of vTap for Java-enabled phones from Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, LG and Sony Ericsson.

Murali Aravamudan, founder and CEO visited the Beet.TV studios last week for a demonstration and explanation. He told Beet.TV that the search engine has indexed "tens of millions" of videos and considers it among the most comprehensive index of videos on the Web. (This directory is not available to the PC, just through the mobile browser)

We saw Beet.TV clips looking fantastic on a Samsung Black Pearl over the AT&T network. To see the clips on the iPhone, a WiFi connection was helpful so we headed over to a nearby Starbucks. (Unfortunately, I can't see the clips on my Verizon 8830 BeetBerry.)

The "Garden Wall," the limited selection of video clips offered by carriers, is gone. A few months ago, I interviewed Peter Rojos, editor of Engadget, the world's most influential blog. Peter wondered when the walls would come down. Well, this might be it.

vTap has been getting some good notices over the past few days from Om Malik, Rafe Needleman and Robert Scoble. Kristen Nicole at Mashable reports on the launch this morning.


-- Andy Plesser

Beet.TV is Getting Slick!

Please note some snazzy new production values over here at the purple network. We've bought some new lights and David shot this interview with two cameras. We will have a second interview with Murali over the next few days. Stay tuned.

Posted on Monday, September 10, 2007

http://www.beet.tv/2007/09/breaking-millio.html

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• veveo
• mobile
• vTap