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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."
When the hell did that come about?
Honsetly... I've only heard of Google and YouTube so far.
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.''
Is there ANY market segment where Yahoo! isn't playing second-fiddle to somebody else?
If you haven't foed me yet, what are you waiting for?
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.
YouTube will continue it's dominance until one of two things happen: a) YouTube actually starts moderating and deleting it's illegal content or b) YouTube starts making money. If they get rid of all their illegal content, half of their userbase is pretty much gone, including me. It's pretty nice to be able to watch episodes of South Park and Aqua Teen Hunger Force, among hundreds of other shows. If they start making money, then production studios and the MPAA are going to want a piece of it and start spitting out law suits and cease and desist orders until the site is FORCED to delete half it's content, run 120% more ads to cover legal fees, and it's subscriber base falls to nothing.
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.
That's not really fair. It doesn't hurt anyone, and I welcome the idea of another video provider. If someone sends me a link to video, I don't really care if it's google or youtube or now yahoo. If you're publishing videos online you're probably hitting all the major players anyway -- you won't have any trouble finding the video you're looking for at any of the providers.
Sure they won't make money directly off of it... but that's not _my_ problem.
If Yahoo! is doing this for a reason other than to make money, it's not good business sense.
On the other hand, creating more competition, whether it's profitable or not, is good for consumers. Allowing another player to get a "strong hold" of the market is certainly not good for consumers.
I don't believe I've seen a less insightful comment on Slashdot in a month, and I suspect the poster is a shill for one of Yahoo!'s competitors. Either that or a head injury patient.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
It seems everytime you turn around to view someone's video, there's a requirement for yet another proprietary codec. If Yahoo would allow the videos to be uploaded/downloaded in a standard format (like mpeg4 or quicktime) rather than yet another oddball format (yahoo video? WTF?), then they might have something.
No more oddball codecs for me. No WMP either. M$ can keep their DRM and stick it. And I have banned Flash from my system as well.
When all else fails, run.
this is the same as http://video.search.yahoo.com/ which I've had bookmarked for months already.
-- Boycott Shell
I do partly agree with you. Actually.
It is not good business sense that they will find it hard to earn money, but it is good business sense that they will holds onto their customers with more service.
It is not always good for consumer that there are more competition, but personally, I believe video is one of the thing that need a major player to fight the traditional broadcast company. More compeition in this field on the internet is only going to make the switch from TV broadcast to internet TV much more difficult in the long run.
I do not agree with me being head injury patient. However, I don't plan on insulting one neither. =P
Google, CNET, YouTube and now Yahoo: they all use Flash as their video player, as well as thousands of other big news and entertainment sites.
Who would've thought that Flash will become the most popular vehicle for delivering video on the Internet?
All of a sudden, the EU's ruling that media player competition does not stand a chance because of the WMP built into Windows seems overexaggerated (not that it wasn't overexaggerated before..).
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.
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 :)