Will Yahoo! Go Be the Next Media Bridge?

wh0pper writes "Digital Trend has an interesting take on Yahoo! Go. With Yahoo's acquisition of Meedio, Yahoo! Go will be in the position to be everyones media bridge. With Yahoo!'s intended arrival in the TV environment, it aspires to become the user's guide to all media." From the article: "This would appear to be the worst of nightmares for traditional PayTV operators. Suddenly, they become part of a Yahoo!-defined walled garden of sorts, hidden behind the Yahoo!-branded user interface and reduced to a simple pipe that delivers broadcast television. Without their own proprietary IPG being used, how can they sell pay-per-view and VOD movies?"

Comments

Re:Yahoo copying again...

[FOSSguy]

Clearly Bittorrent is their worst nightmare already... Yahoo is one step behind on this one.

It's only their worse nightmare because all they have is nightmares. "Two left feet and ugly shoes" is where the entertainment industry is at right now!

Wake up media industry folks, we don't want your dead business model! Frankly, if Yahoo! is their second worst nightmare, then that's a pretty good start from where I'm sitting. More power to Yahoo! on this one!

Farewell, myHTPC... er, Meedio.

[GreyDuck]

First came myHTPC, a clunky but serviceable bit of software which allowed me to run music playlists and (more importantly) watch anime fansubs on my (moderately) large television and (again, more importantly) listen to them on my nice audio system in the living room, all controlled by something like ATI's Remote Wonder.

Then came Meedio, which we had to pay for (and I did, gladly) but reduced the clunk-factor by (let's pick an arbitrary fraction) 2/3 and did a much better job of playing nice with the remote control hardware available to me at the time, namely the aforementioned Remote Wonder as well as Creative's LiveDrive IR remote.

Over the weekend, on a whim, I selected "Check for updates" and, hello? "A new update is available. Visit www.meedio.com to download." Righto! And yet... no. Yes, there's a 1.41 release. No, you can't have it (from regular channels, anyway; thank the gods for Google, natch). Now it's Yahoo! Go, a slick, useless lump based on a fair portion of Meedio's code but without any of the configuration capability (short of hand-editing the XML, which... um, no?) and, by the way, no apparent support for reading tags in music files. But hey, it's free!

I won't say "I want my thirty-five bucks back," 'cause I don't, and I'm generally pleased with my Meedio experience. I am, however, deeply chagrined that things have taken a turn for the blah.

Oh, by the way: If your current Meedio version reads Ogg Vorbis tags correctly, DON'T hunt down the 1.41 upgrade. Updating broke Vorbis tag reading on my system...