YouTube Mobile Redesigned, Now Using HTML5 for Video

YouTube has updated the mobile version of their site with several important improvements, including now serving videos using the HTML5 video tag. If you’re using an HTML5 compliant mobile browser, which includes the iPhone and Android phones, you’ll get the new and improved site. If you hit m.youtube.com with an older phone (or a desktop web browser) you’ll get the older, more basic version instead.

The redesigned mobile site features touch-friendly interface changes, speed improvements, and much higher quality video than the previous Edge-optimized version. The original mobile site launched in 2007 and the native iPhone YouTube app has hardly been updated since the first iPhone was released, so many of the changes revolve around getting the mobile site on the same page as changes to the full version of the site. Most importantly, users can now choose to watch the high quality versions of videos when available.

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Cisco Show and Share: YouTube for the Enterprise?

Last week at an event in Las Vegas, Cisco surprised the tech blogs when they announced their new Android-based tablet dubbed the Cius. Without a cool new gadget to go with it, their new social video system didn’t cause as much of a stir but may end up having the bigger impact on the way companies communicate, collaborate, and educate their employees. Cisco Show and Share could be YouTube for the enterprise.

Show and Share looks to make it easy for employees to upload, share, and edit videos within the security of the corporate network. Videos can be synced with presentation slides making them great instructional tools or a way to archive meetings for those who could not attend. Uploaded videos can be made available only for certain users and extensive viewing statistics are available, great for making sure everyone has seen the important video from HR or the marketing team has watched the new training video.

Perhaps most importantly, speech to text technology can automatically create searchable transcripts of uploaded videos. Once videos are transcribed, categorized, and labeled in Show and Share, employees will have easy access to the knowledge of coworkers both down the hall from them and across the country.

Knowledge sharing is one of the most important components of the modern corporate intranet and that doesn’t just mean making files available in a central repository. Increasingly, multimedia and connecting employees to each other to encourage communication are becoming the preferred way to promote knowledge transfer and to stay on the leading edge. Video tools such as Cisco Show and Share could go a long way in not only making the information available, but also making employees actually want to use it.

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