Dailymotion's iPhone App Heats Up Mobile Web Video Race

Here comes the battle for mobile web series viewing, and Dailymotion today lobbed its two-pronged attack on the field with its new iPhone and iPod touch application. The French-based video site is popular in several countries, and fittingly the app is available in 9 different languages—English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, and Greek. There are 14 themed channels like “Funny,” “College,” “Gaming” and “Travel” which sort out the site 12 million videos that have been made available for mobile viewing. Amongst the featured videos today are a handful of web series like TempsMort.tv, Legend of Neil and Compulsions.

Dailymotion supported iPhone viewing since early 2007 via the phone’s built-in Safari browser, but now the navigation and organization of what to watch just got a lot more manageable. Users will also have the choice of two versions—a free, ad-supported one and an ad-free premium app available for $5.99.

The best feature from a web video creator’s point of view is the ability to record video from the iPhone (if you have a 3GS) and upload directly to your Dailymotion account. So far none of the other major video sites have built in this feature yet. Also in the announcement today is word of upcoming news in 2010 for further distribution of the site’s video content “across all three major screens.”

Another European video site, Babelgum, has also making waves in the States lately building out its curated channels of web series offerings. Babelgum’s free iPhone app (see right) has been on the market for about a year, and isn’t as slick or intuitive as Dailymotion’s new app. The opening screen defaults to a clunky jumble of thumbnail clips (that rearrange when the iPhone is shaken). The bright sides are the exclusive they have on Funny or Die videos for mobile, as part of a two-year deal announced back in July.

Babelgum also built the iPhone app for MetaCafe, another French video site that gets some occasional play with US users. Its app also suffers from the gimmicky thumbnail interface however.