Yahoo! Launches Live Video Service and We Cover it...Live...Sort of
The rumored launch of Yahoo!'s live video service became reality tonight at Live.Yahoo.com. I'm covering it live, in video below. It looks pretty good though early tests are experiencing scaling issues already. Apparently, the company that gets more web traffic than anyone on earth is incapable so far of handling 400 people watching 30 live video streams. Actually, a flood of early adopters just came in via Twitter and the thing promptly broke - completely as far as I can tell.
The service combines many of the best practices developed by early explorers of the medium, tiny startups that must be very worried tonight. Part BlogTV, part Mogulus and just plain better than UStream - below is a live player and some key points of differentiation. For an in depth discussion of why live video is going to be huge, see this post I wrote last year and the discussion in comments.
If this player is down, try my page at http://live.yahoo.com/marshallk
Coolness
As many as five participants can do video and audio on one page together.
Chat gives users choice over fonts and colors.
Yahoo! magically grabs usernames in some circumstances but not all. Cookies, bits of cookies.
An API is already offered. That's great.
It's Yahoo! so it should be able to scale...oh nevermind.
Update from Richard: the service was going fine until more than 5 people showed up. I didn't grab a screenshot while it was in working mode, but for a brief time Marshall was live blogging RWW on Yahoo Live:
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Hey that's great! Now once we take over Yahoo all they have to do is switch the live and yahoo to http://yahoo.live.com and we're all set.
I think it's important to emphasize that Yahoo! Live is an experiment. Like we said in our post on Yahoo! Next: http://next.yahoo.net/archives/87/y-live-%e2%80%93-the-world-is-watching)
"Keep in mind that Y! Live is an experimental release. The Advanced Products team is a small incubation team at Yahoo! – our mission is to build stuff and launch it quickly, and respond to market feedback. Y! Live is a limited capacity release, so bear with us as and we may reach our limits in periods of high traffic. Our top priority now is to hear your feedback – send your comments to ylive@yahoogroups.com , follow our twitter feed, and check out the blog to stay with the conversation."
A large pizza feeds the entire team who put Live together. :)
Too little too late. It takes Yahoo 5 years to enter the game and they enter obsolete. It's unclear how they have hung on this well. It seems likely that search will be next to go. Google of course, and then new players like ManagedQ will chip them apart.
Chad, you rock dude, sorry to bad mouth your project. I'm cheering for you guys, this just didn't go so well at launch. Like at all. But seriously, good luck with it.
Interesting, their site is down due to heavy load.
Here's a list of all companies who stream video in the space.
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/05/16/a-list-of-companies-and-services-that-provide-live-web-video-streaming/
I always thought that this would have happened during the Holidays of 2007. My predictions were off by 2 months for a big internet player to come in.
The service is still very much in its infancy and has been down at times. Since the website is already telling that there are 2134+ people watching 89+ live channels, its understood that there is quite a bit of load on it very quickly.