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YouTube on the AppleTV and the iPhone
By Sparky | July 8, 2007
I’m never was a terribly heavy YouTube user but now that it’s both always in my pocket and on the nice Audio/Video system at home I find myself filling a spare moment here and there with random videos. Most of these videos fall into one of four categories - cute, funny, cute and funny, or the largest category: paper-thin mid-to-post teens producing mostly random and meaningless content. I’m not entirely sure if the world is a better place having been subjected to the last category but I’d rather have crappy user created content be king than populate an internet based on censorship where such drivel isn’t permitted.
Content gamut aside one of the things that has struck me as odd over my past week of using my iPhone is how differently implemented the YouTube application is on my iPhone versus my AppleTV. They both allow for the browsing of a partial selection of the YouTube library streamed directly from the internet, but they both have some features the other lacks. Here is a breakdown of client-specific features that have puzzled me:
AppleTV:
- On my AppleTV I can sign into my standard YouTube account using my Google credentials.
- Because I can sign into my YouTube account I can rate videos.
- I can save videos to my accounts ‘favorites’ list for later viewing on either the AppleTV or in a web browser.
- Unlink the iPhone there is no way to share videos with friends. Although I understand that there is no built in web browser one would think you could at least sync the recommendation to iTunes and have iTunes send a mail using your default mail client on the desktop PC.
iPhone:
- I can’t sign into my web-based YouTube account.
- There is no way to rate videos, however I can view what others average rating for a video is.
- Because I am not signed in I cannot mark a video as a favorite. There is a bookmarking feature which serves a similar need, however bookmarked videos do not show up in my favorites list on the YouTube website or on my AppleTV.
- I can send links to YouTube videos from the mail client on the iPhone via the ‘Share’ button in the YouTube UI. Sharing is fun and creates a very social experience out of it.
All in all I think YouTube was a great addition to both product offerings, but I’m puzzled as to the disparity in the feature lists. I will be interested to see if future software updates for both platforms bring their feature sets closer together. Google’s “cloud of data” and Apple’s experience in creating engaging and intuitive user interfaces making for a market juggernaut that will be hard to beat.
Topics: Apple, Cellphones, Gadgets, Internet, Reviews, Software, Technology, Video, Vodcasting, Web gems, iPhone |
July 8th, 2007 at 10:17 am
This might be a workaround for signing in to youtube with your google account.
First visit gmail and login to get your cookie, then paste this link into your browser:
http://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=youtube&continue=http://www.youtube.com/signup&passive=true
It worked for me.
July 8th, 2007 at 11:40 am
Thanks for the tip - I’m giving it a try right now!
July 8th, 2007 at 5:26 pm
Sadly logging in via a browser did nothing to ‘log in’ the iPhone’s YouTube application. Since it is a full thick client experience I doubt if it’s even aware of the browser, and much less its own browser heritage.