Feb

7

Yahoo Goes Live

February 7, 2008 |

Update: it seems to be working well right now. Kevin Rose is on and it hasn’t crashed yet…

Yahoo just launched a live video service. Clearly, Yahoo has looked at Stickam, Ustream, Justin.tv and other live video services and decided to copy the best of all of them.

Here is how they describe it:

Y! Live was dreamed up as a way to make it possible for anyone to create their own live video experience. Want to broadcast your life? DJ a live set to a remote audience? Broadcast a nightclub vibe to the Web? Build a video speed dating application? We’ve created a website and an API that lets you do all these things and many more

And I have to say that it actually looks very cool. The interface is very polished, though a bit dark for my taste.

It has a chat room that reminds me a lot of the Ustream chat, the live video can be embedded into any webpage, five people can use the room at the same time, there is an API you can tap into, and they even have set up a Twitter account… to tell you who is broadcasting live right now… what that would be good for, I am not quite sure about.

One thing is for sure, though. Yahoo is having some issues keeping the service running stable for now. Right now, for example, the chat-room for my channel isn’t working at all (you can check it here - maybe I will keep the camera on for a while).

Overall, though, this is an interesting move. The market for streaming live video is still small, but with Yahoo putting its power behind this idea, we are going to see a lot more people trying this out and maybe using it in new, creative ways. I also like that fact that with their API, they have clearly set this up to be a service that others can built upon.

As as now, though, they need to get the service running a bit smoother. Once Yahoo gets that out of the way, this will be, as Mathew Ingram put it, “a killer ‘life-streaming’ product.”

Now I just have to figure out who JT the Bigga Figga is…

Sidenote: the word about this first broke on Twitter - something that is becoming more and more common

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