Here’s a formula: Take a well known and popular Internet service, like YouTube, and offer a cut-down version for mobile. Assume that users will be interested because they’re already huge fans of the well known service. Sit back and watch as the service goes….nowhere.

I haven’t seen the Voda-YouTube offering, so I might be speaking out of turn. However, given the history of the formula, I think we all know how these things usually go.

There is a “YouTube Mobile” service today. With it, users can upload videos from their mobile phones using MMS. This isn’t really a mobilized version of YouTube, it’s just a tiny part of the experience. Vodafone claims that users will get a selection of videos to view on their mobiles. It will be interesting to see how well that works. Isn’t this taking the long-tail and making it short again? Actually, for impatient mobile users, this approach can work, so long as the content is rotated often enough.

Take a good look at YouTube and you will see how complicated the user interface is and how much information is displayed on each page in order to allow the user to discover and enjoy content. It seems clear that YouTube and Voda will have to work hard to create an experience that works well on the mobile phone.

Given the popularity of YouTube as an “entertainment stop” on the Internet highway, can we eventually expect a “YouTube TV” channel? This might work for Mobile TV, as in broadcast TV (e.g. DVB-H). Users get an edited magazine of “what’s hot” videos in bite-size chunks, probably with a voice-over and some obligatory zany background music. The most popular videos could actually be broadcast over the DVB-H carousel for “instant” offline viewing. Otherwise, using the interactive interface, users could click-off to view clips via the Internet.