LG Electronics and the popular video website YouTube, on Tuesday announced they had reached an agreement to provide YouTube access on LG mobile phones. The YouTube-enabled handsets will be released worldwide by the end of 2007.

“People want to be able to capture interesting moments with their cell phones wherever they are and whenever they want," said Steve Chen, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer for YouTube.
Similar to the iPhone, users will be able to watch videos from YouTube.com. However, unlike with Apple’s device, users will also be able to shoot and upload videos directly from their mobile phones as they would with their home computers, through a new interface found in LG’s YouTube-enabled phones.

LG already has an agreement to pre-install Google's services, including Google search, Google maps, and Gmail, on its handsets since March of 2007. But Google is not the only company LG has signed with, some LG devices offer services such as Yahoo Go for Mobile 2.0, Yahoo Mail and Instant Messenger.

The new phones might multiply the options for user-generated content, leading to new kinds of mobile-shot video and to a proliferation of cell-phone-based news gathering. Market research group iSuppli suggest the mobile content market will be worth around $44 billion by 2011, putting YouTube in a key position.