Would you pay $15 a month to be able to watch cheesy YouTube videos on your cellphone? Verizon is betting that you will. The company has licensed the rights to a selection of YouTube videos that Verizon subscribers will be able to download and watch on their cellphone. This represents, perhaps, the 457th attempt by a cellular company to get people to pay for content no one cares much about. ESPN recently gave up trying to get people to watch sports on cellphones, after burning through a few hundred million of someone's money.
YouTube is not exactly "must see" TV. It is generally the kind of fluff you might pull up at ten PM after you realize there is nothing on the old-fashioned television. You watch a couple of YouTube clips and go to bed. YouTube is popular, in part, because it is free. Making it cost money will be interesting because we will be able to establish its real value, and Verizon shareholders will get to foot the bill for this market research.
The flaw in all these fairly silly cellphone content ventures is the wrongheaded assumption that there is an unlimited supply of subscribers willing to pay for unnecessary stuff on top of their basic cellphone bill. At the core, it is a supply and demand issue. There may be an unlimited supply of content these days, but demand is not as elastic. Watch this venture quietly fold in about a year.