From time to time, I’ll be surfing on my iPhone and when I try to follow a link to a video, I’ll get the message “The owner of this video has not made it available for mobile viewing” or something to that effect. Why would the owner of the video care? Wouldn’t they want as much traffic to their video as possible?
do mobile players strip/subvert ads?
What videos? I have seen reports that some music labels are not allowing things to be viewed on iphones.
When you upload a video to YouTube, you are given the option to allow the video to be displayed on a “mobile device” or not.
EDIT: And I think by default it is set not to allow mobile viewing, so whomever uploaded the video may have thought otherwise or did not even realize it was a setting in the first place.
YouTube Mobile servers are different from the the main servers that supply the videos to your computer. Unlike the latter, it does not require the Adobe Flash Player, using HTML5 pages instead (IIRC). The content of the site for mobile devices is a subset of their overall content which has been reformatted to eliminate the need for Flash.
Late last year, I read that Adobe Flash Player is being phased out of the mobile market. As far as I could see, there never came to be a sufficient degree of coordination/cooperation among Adobe, OS developers, and device manufacturers. I’ve heard of cases in which a particular make and model of smart phone would be able to run the then-current version of Flash, and then come the next version of Flash, you were out of luck if that was your phone.
Goodbye Flash, and good riddance. The world became a better place for mobile device users on the day Adobe decided to discontinue it for mobile devices.
Even in the few months since then, I’ve noticed that it’s less often that I can’t play something on my mobile because it requires Flash, but there still are some pages where you do need it.
I missed this on preview, but this is certainly interesting. I didn’t know the decision of whether to display a video on mobile devices was made by the person uploading the video.