YouTube sees 400% increase in Mobile Video uploads

You would be sleeping out cold in a cave if you weren’t expecting this to happen. Google is reporting that they have documented a 4 times increase in mobile video uploads – all thanks to the newly released iPhone 3G S which supports video recording at VGA resolution (640×480 at 30 fps) and direct upload to YouTube and Apple’s own MobileMe.

Though video capture has been available in mobile handsets for years now, it’s kind of alarming that a single phone could make so much of a difference. But there are some strong reasons behind that too.

• Most handsets with direct upload to YouTube functionality were Nokia, which the US based market (who have the biggest usage share on YouTube) usually avoids.
• A very slim number of handsets allow video capture at a higher resolution than QVGA (320×240) at decent frame rates.
• We are talking about the iPhone here, which literally slaughters the competition, even though it didn’t even have the complete feature set to qualify it as a smartphone – well until iPhone OS 3.0 that is.
• People who had got their hands on the iPhone 3G S would have tried mobile uploads at least once to check out how it actually works.

With that said, it is still a remarkable feat and we can see where things would be going from here on. With handsets like Omnia HD which can capture 720p video, we can expect to see dedicated pocket camcorders die out pretty soon. Oh and on a side note, NVIDIA’s Tegra platform, and iPhone 3G S are capable of doing 720p video too.

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