YouTube on your cellphone, sort of

In case you missed it, Verizon recently announced a deal with YouTube which would allow Verizon wireless customers to view YouTube content on their cellphones via Verizon’s V CAST service.

Sound cool? This Ars Technica write-up quickly gets to the unfortunate details:

V CAST subscribers will be able to watch a limited selection of videos on YouTube, including ones considered the “most popular.” V CAST subscriptions require a supported handset and either a $15 per month subscription or the payment of a $3 daily access fee. Currently, Verizon offers short sports, news, weather, and entertainment clips from the major networks over V CAST.

Although YouTube has been hitting some snags with copyright holders lately, the main appeal of the site is the vast amount of video content that has been uploaded. For every Daily Show clip, there are twenty random bits of video created by the site’s users. A lot of it may be crap, but there is cool stuff to be found if you dig around.

Call me crazy, but when I hear that YouTube content will be available on my cellphone, I imagine that it means I will have access to all that same content, and I’d be willing to bet that the average Verizon customer thinks the same.

But no, for an extra fifteen bucks a month (on top of what I already pay Verizon for my phone service), I can get access to ten videos a day. To add insult to injury, they’re videos selected by Verizon, based on presumed popularity and appropriateness.

This agreement represents exactly the wrong way to go about doing online content delivery. While I don’t count myself among the “Information wants to be free” crowd, I’d like to think that if I’m paying for a premium service, I should have access to the full body of content. The Verizon/YouTube deal is akin to the various attempts at pay-for-download music services that turn out to feature a limited catalog, or onerous DRM restrictions on downloaded content, or both.

I’m sure some Verizon customers will pay for this service and not realize they’re getting screwed. In that sense, it’s probably a good move for both companies, but it’s a shame that it’s such a crummy deal for consumers.