Slashdot Mirror
Yahoo! Launches YouTube Competitor
prostoalex writes "Yahoo! launched Yahoo! Video last night, allowing users to upload, share and tag their videos. For Windows users the player uses the standard Yahoo! Player, while Mac and Linux users get video encoded in Flash. Yahoo! joins a highly competitive field of video services currently led by MSN Video, YouTube and Google Video. The Associated Press reports on the Yahoo! Video launch as well."
I can't see a way to download the videos to you HD, at least not on the one that I tried, I like google video because at least then you can download it and not have to constantly stream from the net; also then you can use mplayer.
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
So, do Linux users get the video encoded in a Flash object that requires Flash 8, like many Flash videos seem to require nowadays, but which isn't actually available for Linux? Hooray for proprietary software!
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
When the hell did that come about?
(in reference to MSN Video)
I hadn't heard of it either. But according to the article link, it's beating both Google Video and YouTube for audience..
Top video sites in February 2006
Site Audience, 000 YTY Change
MSN Video 9,279 44%
YouTube 9,045 NA
Google Video 6,246 NA
iFILM 4,336 102%
video.search.yahoo.com 3,774 148%
I've actually been using their video search for sometime now and really like it. It's much superior to Google's video crap and I really hate surfing through tons of sites I've never heard of to figure out which ones have caught on enough to have decent content.
Yahoo! just gives me what I need without the hassle. And Yahoo! has such a strong user base for things well beyond Video that they'll attract far more content than most of the niche competition sites.
BTW, it does ALOT for Yahoo!'s customers. It's keeping me from going all Google and that's a huge part of why they're doing it in the first place.
Yahoo Finance is very good. Not perfect, but far more useful than Google's.
Yahoo Mail has the largest number of users. So that's one market in which they're the leader.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
The scary part about Yahoo's video site upon further inspection, is that they're actually hotlinking a lot of those videos to the originating site, instead of being hosted locally by Yahoo. So they're "stealing" that site's bandwidth while not giving them any ad revenue by sending you to their site instead. This issue of hotlinking images is definitely in the grey area of legality, but now imagine it on the scale of Yahoo popularity, and with videos so the amount of bandwidth used skyrockets. It's definitely morally wrong.
There's another video site called Blit.tv. The difference? They promise to offer their video encoded with a Free and open codec.
First, it's IE/WiMP10 only. It doesn't allow upload, so it doesn't really belong. I'm guessing almost all of those hits are from people watching video from MSNBC.com. I'd imagine CNN would have more video views than MSNBC though.
Go to Keepvid.com They may not have Yahoo!Video support yet but I'm sure they will soon since they already support downloads for YouTube, GoogleVideo, iFilm, Break, FindVideos, etc. etc.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
YouTube is reportedly losing money as fast as the average dotcom in 2000. Over $1M/month now and climbing. Someone's got to find a way to monetize these services if they're going to be viable. What does Yahoo bring to this, to make it sustainable? Advertisements worth watching?
I keep reading bloggers talking about wanting net neutrality so they can have all of these nifty videos, but none of them have any idea how to monetize the services necessary to support online video applications. Take Instapundit, if Instapundit delivered a video to half of its readers a day, it would probably go through about a quarter to half a terabyte of bandwidth everyday.
What I would like to know is if there really is any money in the "amateur hour" video market. If there isn't, these services will quickly give way to professionally done content, be it from independent artists or major groups.
Never mind. The whole thing is out of date already anyway. With Linux broadcatching apps like Democracy Player and KatchTV and Penguin TV, there's really no need to look at those sites again. Just run an app, and choose a show to watch :)