YouTube Upgrades Mobile Website

By Ian Bell Updated July 7, 2010

YouTube has upgraded its mobile website to make it more convenient and appealing to watch videos on touch-screen devices such as Apple Inc.’s iPhone and Motorola Inc.’s Droid X.

The improvements unveiled Wednesday are designed to make it easier for smart phone users to navigate YouTube’s vast video library. The fine-tuning also enables YouTube’s mobile website to stream videos in higher resolution than clips served up through YouTube applications installed on smart phones.

There is still at least one significant problem to be worked out: YouTube says the mobile website encounters some bugs on the hot-selling iPhone 4 phone. Those issues are expected to be resolved within the next few weeks. Apple sells the iPhone 4 with a YouTube application already installed on it.

YouTube, owned by Google Inc., is sprucing up its mobile website as part of its effort to create a “video operating system” that works on any gadget with a screen. Mobile phones are a particularly important target for YouTube. In five years, the site expects more people to be surfing the Web on mobile phones than on desktop computers.

As it stands now, YouTube says it’s showing more than 100 million videos per day on mobile devices. That’s roughly the same number of YouTube clips that were being watched on office and home computers when Google bought the site for $1.76 billion in late 2006. YouTube says people now watch more than 2 billion daily videos through all its distribution channels.

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