Posted by smojo on February 8, 2008
Yahoo! Live or also known now as Y! Live made its debut to the public yesterday. Many people were late to the party and got there when the party was at maximum capacity. Everyone included myself were greeted by the image above. The most visited site on the net could not handle a few hundred people going to live.yahoo.com to watch some live streams. It seems that the Yahoo! Live team were not expecting this many people and it makes me wonder why they didn’t have some sort of private beta to help test this thing out before it was open to everyone. One thing that is safe to say is the service will run smoothly once they throw some servers at.
Having a major internet brand like Yahoo! jump into the live streaming business is going have a major impact on some of the live video sites. If Y! Live becomes slightly popular you could see other major companies such as Google and News Corp joining in and trying to play catch up. The easiest way to play catch up would be to buy a startup. So is it possible that in the future we could see such sites as Justin.tv, Ustream or even BlogTV being bought up. Guess we will just to wait and see what the future holds. I’m anxious to see what happens.
Popularity: 30% [?]
Posted by smojo on January 30, 2008
Rumors are flying around the internet that Yahoo is going to offer a “lifecasting” service. It is reported that the service is only open to Yahoo employees for the moment. The url for the new service looks like it will be http://live.yahoo.com/. It is currently giving a 403 forbidden error when you go to that address so we are all blocked out. I’m hoping Yahoo will make a formal announcement about the service. We need more details.
One thing that is kind of annoying me is everyone using the term “lifecasting”. This new service will have very little lifecasting going on. My predictions are that this new Yahoo service will be just another chatcasting site. What I mean by chatcasting is users will be sitting in front of their computer with the web cam on them and they will be chatting with viewers. This is not lifecasting! Lifecasting to me is broadcasting your everyday events. It is about being mobile and letting others peek in to what you are doing for the day. This is going to be just another web cam site where 15 year old girls fire up their cam and dance around while a bunch of horny guys say immature and stupid comments. We will have to wait and see but I don’t think anything new or innovative will be coming from Yahoo’s new service. What do you think about it?
Popularity: 25% [?]
