Live video streaming seemed to be all the rage for a while, popularized by startups like Justin.tv, Ustream, Qik, Mogulus and Flixwagon.
Yahoo jumped on the hype wagon back in February 2008 by launching Y!Live, an ambitious effort put forward by internal incubator Yahoo! Brickhouse. Yahoo Live was supposed to tap into the troubled internet juggernaut’s vast online video audience by getting them to broadcast their lives in real-time.
Now Yahoo software engineer Keith Thornill has published a blog post announcing that Y!Live, which never really passed the idea stage, will effectively stop broadcasting December 3. Yahoo is hosting a townhall on Wednesday to wish the service farewell.
Live video streaming still presents an enormous opportunity considering the way people’s behavior on the web is changing, but it is of course extremely expensive and hard to scale. Serving the same video to thousands, let alone tens of thousands of people simultaneously generates higher bandwidth bills than serving them asynchronously like most video sharing sites do. YouTube, by far the most popular online video property on the web, is rumored to want to start experimenting with live video streaming some day, but so far we haven’t seen anything surface.
Perhaps the Yahoo from a year ago would have no problem continuing to test the waters and keeping the service alive a bit longer, but the way things are looking now they’ll be looking to cut costs in every possible way for a while.
It’s also quite telling for the service’s popularity that no one has cared to comment on the blog post yet (they were probably in moderation when I wrote this). Also, at the time of this writing there are exactly 1,379 people watching 48 live channels.
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A day late and a dollar short. Pretty much sums up Y! on everything since 2001.
Sorry guys. Wrong URL in my signature.
bam bam double spam
whats wrong with yahoo?
they pay millions to buy startups like these, then shutdown in-house-made apps of their own.
stupid yahoo does not know what to do, build products to increase revenues or to play for media to increase stock value.
YouTube live sounds like a horrible idea.
YouTube right now is bad as it is. Once youtube is “live” it will be a epicenter of live piracy.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Yahoo shut Live! down and turned around and bought UStream or Justin.tv… and shut them down 8 months later.
Please don’t buy Usteam and ruin it!
Ustream FTW w00t!
Jesus Christ, y’all. Yahoo launch an experiment in their incubation lab (Brickhouse) and now they’re shutting it down. Not sure I see what you’re complaining about.
If they didn’t experiment you’d say they weren’t trying to innovate. If they kept the service alive with exactly 1,379 people, you’d say they couldn’t make choices. It seems like the only option is to only launch ideas that go gangbusters.
There are a ton of reasons to hate on Yahoo right now, but launching ideas and then killing ones that don’t work isn’t one of them. It sounds to me like the basic fucking fundamental law of online entrepreneurialism.
Oh No! Yahoo is still unraveling. How long will this take? Can anyone save them?
I use a lot of Yahoo products: Messenger, 360, Groups, Web Hosting/Business Mail, Flickr and Answers just to name a few. If it weren’t for TechCrunch, I doubt that I ever would have even heard of Live. if you don’t promote or support a product, people won’t use it.
Sad to see Live go away. Another great Yahoo product but other sites are doing a better job at least for now.
This is why you can’t build your business on someone else’s service. {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/7pkgIZPTeq_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”This is why you can’t build your business on someone else’s service. ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/sAVdAfNNmZ”}}}
Well, there’s one team that getting laid off.
Hey at least it can get rid of copying the name of MSN Live. But in seriousness, I think Yahoo can generate a lot of revenue and cash if it becomes a financial company and promotes e-commerce by creating checking and debit accounts for its 300 million users. It can be like paypal except bigger.
The problem was that it got implemented in Flex. Flex alone cannot make a service like this work right (try to use it while in a packed channel and see how it consumes all your pc resources after 10 minutes). a simple example is how PalTalk Express uses a Flex/Java implementation. but this could work using Silverlight 2. but i doubt yahoo would do that. they even decided in a sudden move to end all their experiments and development on .NET/WPF (starting with the yahoo messenger for vista) . just a little before in PDC 2008 showed that .NET/WPF will go places since even Visual Studio 2010 will be done that way.
Now I have to remove my web page that makes use of their API.
Maybe and hopefully this amount of vigor will keep Yahoo! Live around. It’s been nothing but pleasurable to become acquainted with Y! Live users!!!
Sincerely,
..::Logic::..
Is there any other video streaming sites that are offering what Yahoo! Live offered — specifically, up to 5 people chatting on their webcams at the same time? I’m trying to find a free or pay service that allows for that. Please hit me up with some info if you’ve got any! Thanks.
I don’t know how Justin.TV survives. It’s just a site full of underage girls, sluts and perverts.