Do We Need a Site/Tool for Mobile Video Sharing?

Sure we want to share online video directly from our iPhone without the torture of downloading, synching, editing, compressing and uploading. But can the online-video mobile market sustain a middle-man brand/app for this activity? Or will this ultimately resolve itself when mobile devices standardize on how they behave with existing video sites?

I enjoy some of the unique and free tools that connect our mobile phone’s video with social media sites, but I don’t see many of these sustaining. It’s simply too hard to keep track of various apps, tools and websites… While these puppies solve an immediate need, it seems hard to imagine more than a couple players serving the void between mobile device operating systems and more popular video-sharing sites like, um, YouTube. It’s a redundant, confusing, crowded and poorly differentiated landscape… and most of the names/brands are forgettable or horrible.

That said, here are a few options with different strengths and weaknesses, and most rely on Twitter/Facebook for login, so perhaps they’re just hoping to get acquired by the highly profitable sites. 😉

Today I read about Socialcam, which is basically a social-media video sharing app that was spawned by Justin.tv and uses Facebook for login.

Then there’s Viddy, which caps you at 15 seconds, gives you Instagram-like filters for retro/cool effects that will certainly age like fine French milk. It allows you to launch your video elsewhere, but has a bit of community too. It improved off of the now-RIP 12-Second TV, which in 2008 was an early entry, and died last November.

TwitVid has been around for a few years. But now twitpic offers video uploads too, so one seems redundant.

Yfrog, which is a name I’ll forget in 10 minutes, offers a unique ability to play the shared video through less usual viewing formats, from wmv, .flv, .mpeg, .mkv, .mov, .3gp, .mp4 to the archaic but quaint .avi format. The even more forgettably named twitc (which I’ve already forgotten) offers some cool ways to organize your videos regardless of what website is hosting them… and allows you to organize them into various albums for sharing across other sites. That’s fairly differentiated, and difficult and unlikely for any video-sharing site to do solo.

But wait. There’s more (see review)… Twitlense, ZocialTV (the poorly named winner), Bubbletweet and Screener. And probably loads more.