I picked up a link today from Steve Rubel on a service called vTap from Veveo. I'm always looking for new technology for my T-Mobile MDA, especially video. vTap is a video service that basically streams from their server to your mobile device through their application. It's not web based its actually installed on the mobile device. I didn't really care for that, but if it made watching Video easier I was willing to try.
After downloading and installing the application I immediately started clicking on all the videos they had available. Problem; none of the videos would run. Some error kept popping up. I thought woah, this can't be good. First impressions in this game mean a lot. I could just as easily uninstalled the app and moved on.
Coincidentally there is a feedback link on the menu and I thought, cool, I'll email the problem and see what happens. It wasn't long before I got a response back from their Customer Support. The person asked me if I would be willing to help them figure this out and I said sure. After giving them the details of my device and the error, I received a message telling me they had discovered a problem with the T-Moble 3G network and they were working on a fix. I was told I could use WiFi in the mean time, and yes, the WiFi part worked fine.
The next morning when I checked my email I was excited to see an email from vTap telling me they had resolved the problem and would I mind downloading the latest version and giving it a go. No problem, I downloaded and installed. Clicked on a video from the list and it worked. Videos were streaming and it was great.
My first impressions of the video were not too good. The quality was so bad I couldn't make out any text on the screen and the whole frame was sorta blurry. So again I fired off an email to vTap to see if there was something I could do. This was my fault. I didn't spend enough time looking at all the settings and was directed by vTap to increase the quality of the video through the configuration screen. Once again, problem solved.
In the end, video isn't very fast on the 3G network. It wasn't bad, but there was a lot of buffering during preview. vTap said it was a good idea to maybe pause the video when first starting for a few seconds to let enough of it buffer before pressing play. That worked most of the time. But this isn't their problem, it's a problem with the network. And the higher the quality the worst it got.
vTap has some potential. I sure appreciated the quick response to my problem. I'm not real sure what the end game is for them. You can search for videos by key words but I'm not sure how large the database of videos is. I'm not sure if it just goes out to the web and uses your key words and sends back a list of videos? I need to find out more, Mostly because I may look at this service for delivering videos for PropertyVOX.com.
What are your thoughts on this type of technology? Check out vTap today.
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