YahooTV

SpaceAdmiral writes "The New York Times is running a story on Yahoo TV. The story focuses on Lloyd Braun's plan to expand Yahoo! News into a more TV-like format." From the article: "Mr. Braun's handiwork is just starting to be seen at Yahoo. And as he increasingly puts his stamp on the company, the rest of the media - both old and new - are watching carefully, if not nervously. As chairman of ABC's entertainment group, Mr. Braun had a penchant for big offbeat concepts like 'Lost,' which won the Emmy for best drama. At Yahoo, why not create programs in genres that have worked on TV but not really on the Web? Sitcoms, dramas, talk shows, even a short daily humorous take on the news much like Jon Stewart's 'Daily Show' are in the works."

Comments

Interesting Concept..

[One Childish N00b]

This looks to be an interesting concept for Yahoo, and maybe an admission that they've lost the just-plain-search battle with Google (that said, I'm a big fan of http://search.yahoo.com/, Google-like interface with Yahoo's faster-updated index - and they don't seem to index half the link-farm 'blogs', not that I've seen how well the Google Blog Search will filter those out of the mainstream search engine) and are moving into being the web's first site-based multimedia provider - browse the index, click the show you want and watch it, full-screen streaming.

Yahoo has always been the type to move towards multimedia content such as this, with their emphasis on cramming everything into one page versus Google's 'just search, but if you poke around we do other things too' mentality. (not criticising either one, they both clearly work well as both have produced highly profitable companies) The bandwidth for doing something like a site supplying news broadcasts and other traditionally TV-based media - and have it watchable for most normal people - is almost here, and if Yahoo manages to get on the bandwagon early and build up their range between now and the time when Joe Average has the bandwidth to have good-quality full-screen video, they could get the jump on Google to provide, like Braun suggests, things like news broadcasts, and maybe sports shows and other TV shows besides - like the DRM'ed download system the BBC suggested for their site a while back, only with streaming video rather than downloading - a system that, with the proper protections, will be easier to swallow for the content providers - the media conglomerates - too.

This could be very interesting.