Yahoo! Brickhouse Ends Live Streaming Video Experiment
When Yahoo! launched its live video streaming service, Y! Live, to the world earlier this year, it was admittedly an "experiment in live video" designed to elicit feedback from the market. Today, Yahoo! has decided that the experiment has received enough feedback - or perhaps too little. They're going to be closing the service down on December 3.
Here at ReadWriteWeb, we've remained proponents of live streaming video, claiming more than once that it is "going to be huge." If that's the case, why is Yahoo! pulling the plug on Y! Live so quickly?
One answer might be the competition. Yahoo! has seen little traction from its user base for the service during a period when services like UStream and Mogulus seem to be growing exponentially. Midway through Yahoo!'s Y! Live experiment, for example, UStream - one of the leaders in the space - boasted nearly 10 million unique viewers per month for its live video streams.
And then there's the slumbering giant that is the promise of YouTube's live streaming.
Long story short, Y! Live never really gained enough of a following to warrant the Brickhouse team continuing to spend development resources on it, according to today's announcement:
Our mission here on the Brickhouse team is to quickly develop product ideas that can add value to Yahoo! as a whole. To do this effectively we constantly evaluate our early-stage products and sometimes have to make the hard decision to move on, in order to continue exploring new territory and developing new products.
So where will the Brickhouse team be focusing their efforts now? It's a safe bet that current Brickhouse darling fire eagle - a service that helps users share their location information with others - will be garnering more attention, especially with the ever growing popularity of geo-aware devices and software entering the market, these days.
And there's always the chance that another Yahoo! experiment will get the green light. What might that be? We'll just have to stay tuned to Yahoo! Next* to see.
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I usually don`t comment on the same thing on multiple places but in this case i will make an exception since pretty much everyone that has written about it seems totally oblivious about why or what could be the reasons for yahoo to back of from the yahoo live idea.
There are many factors:
1.-Money
It was a very very expensive idea experiment.
2.-Development
Development was slow and it would take some time to get it right
3.-Backend
Flex. you can blame it for the two first points too. i don`t know if anyone has visited a packed channel in yahoo live but it is crazy. it consumes resources like there is no tomorrow and in 10-30 minutes you find that it has consumed all your resources unless you got a high end machine.
Flex is also not a bandwith saving minded implementation, it don`t has multi threading. so handling multiple video streams and making everything work right is a hard thing to do. i am surprised by how relatively well it worked actually. but since it came out before flash 10 was came out. it is worth noting that if you try out right now compared to pre flash 10 you will see better performance. more if you are using IE8. it would still had need to get optimized to make that performance gain better and to make better use of being running on flash 10. i think it can work well if adjusted. but maybe yahoo think it is too late and that the effort in doing it is not worth it. so who knows if it may return later once the technicalities have been sorted out.
Funny enough. this is something would have worked right from the start if they had used flex + java like paltalk express does or if they had developed it with Silverlight 2
On YouTube getting into Live Video:
Not going to happen in a Open way. doing so would be the stupidest thing ever. it may happen by giving access to the top youtube users and partners. making it fully open would be a total disaster. youtube is already expensive as it is. so expensive that it still don`t pays itself. adding live broadcasting would bring youtube its knees and would raise cost and resources use into the sky.
if it happens. it will be limited for some or limited in its implementation.