Viewing website embedded video on your mobile phone

When I’m mobile, I more often watch shows from my Slingbox + TiVo. But there’s a lot of good video content and programming that I love to check out online as well. I’m a huge fan of cycling, triathlon and Olympic sports. So it’s without much question why I love Universal Sports. They cover so many of my sports races and events both on TV and online through their website. I also love to catch up on my favorite shows on Hulu.com.  Great sites to watch on your computer but they’re totally unplayable on your mobile phone. Yes, you could download some sort of site specific app/widget for sites like YouTube but the “lite” experience leaves you unfulfilled.

Mobile phone browsers have limitations and for the sake of playing video, its the inability to work with Flash. So I can’t watch on my Nokia N95 what I can normally watch in a browser on my computer, right?  Well, that’s the case with my phone’s pre-installed web browser and other mobile browsers like Opera and Firefox. But now there’s Skyfire.

Browsing UniversalSports.com with Skyfire

Skyfire’s mobile web browser is the closest I’ve come to the experience of a browser on a normal computer, albeit you’re viewing on a much smaller screen.   My biggest gripe is I can’t login to my ESPN account as for some reason the drop down sign in doesn’t work, but other than that, I haven’t found too many limitations.  It will still play the video on the site.  And that’s all I want.  Now I can watch Ironman live on UniversalSports.com while I’m on the roof deck of my friend’s house while watching the Fleet Week air show in SF!   It works with Windows Mobile and Nokia Phones. Download and try it yourself: http://get.skyfire.com or directly from your mobile (yes, from the browser you’ll make obsolete): http://m.skyfire.com

As for iPhone users, unfortunately Skyfire is not available.  But there is a pretty good solution out there, however not as simple (and I have not got this to work for some reason).  Livebuster is not an app, but rather a site that processes and converts video from popular websites and allows you to play them through your Safari browser.  It’s a multiple step process which involves registering for the service, clicking an activation button from your email, bookmarking and opening a special javascript that will enable you to play the flash video.

While they are working on support with a whole list of site (including Facebook), for now you’re limited to YouTube, metacafe, and MySpace, among a few other video sites. Unfortunately, UniversalSports.com is not on their list of sites they’re working on.  So those at Ironman this weekend are out of luck.

To get Livebuster to work on your iPhone, go directly to: http://iphone.livebuster.com

Below is a helpful instructional video that demonstrates the steps to setting up Livebuster.