Amid the turmoil of staff layoffs, takeover offers and merger discussions, Yahoo has relaunched Yahoo Video. The biggest change to the service is the addition of a 16:9 viewer, along with support for files up to 150mb, embedable playlists and improved user profiles. The content focus has changed from simply offering content uploaded by users, to including video material from other Yahoo properties, including music, movies, TV, news and sports. Yahoo Video has struggled to make an impression against Google’s domination of the market and according to comScore is about to be surpassed in traffic by Dailymotion. The service was not helped by Yahoo’s decision to offer its live video streaming service under the Yahoo Live banner instead off Yahoo Video, when there are rumors that Google may offer live streaming from YouTube later this year. Yahoo acquired video advertising service Malvern Networks for $150 million January 31. CrunchBase Information YouTube DailyMotion Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Yahoo Music launched Video 3.0 in beta today. The company sent us the screenshots below to give us a preview of the new video player. Video 3.0 will have both Firefox and Mac compatibility through flash technology, higher quality video streams, and tailored playlist capabilities. It will also allow users to control the player’s video sequence, much like Yahoo Music Unlimited and, to an extent, LAUNCHcast. There is also a recommendation element where other videos will be recommended by Yahoo. Yahoo will distribute a media alert about the new player on Friday, at which time we will learn more about its capabilities. But we are certainly grateful for the early look! → Read More
Web traffic analyst firm Comscore has released their numbers for July and the most striking finding was that traffic to MySpace Video has doubled since June. Prime competitor YouTube saw a 20% increase according to Comscore, putting the site in the top 50 sites visited on the web. Still leading the online video pack? Yahoo! Video, with 21.1 million visitors, up 28-percent from June. Traffic numbers are a real stab in the dark, and the last time we reported on Comscore numbers it was regarding Del.icio.us. Comscore showed a decline in the site’s traffic, owner Yahoo! insisted that the data was incorrect and Hitwise backed up Yahoo! statements with numbers last week. What to make of it all? Well, throw in a giant grain of salt, but there are some tentative conclusions you could draw here. I think it’s an interesting quantification of the impact of MySpace’s video play, launched in January in competition with third party video services like YouTube. It also shows that those MySpace’s actions that have hurt the viral nature of third party services in the MySpace ecosystem have not stopped YouTube from seeing continued growth. You have to wonder about other companies launching today though, with MySpace being a less hospitable environment than it was when YouTube took off. Ultimately though, just as the much beloved Flickr is far smaller still that the legacy site Yahoo! Photos (which is almost 10 times larger), so too is Yahoo! Videos the silent leader at the top of the heap while everyone is talking about the spread of innovation amongst its smaller competitors. A related study by research firm InStat last week argued that they expect the market for online video to grow to ten times its current size over the next 5 years. Who will be the major players in that market? It may be tough for any particular feature set to overcome the momentum of the early movers. Will they be able to monetize their positions? The future of online video certainly looks like a fight. See also this morning’s post on the new partnership between three video startups, Eyespot, Blip.tv and Veoh. → Read More
The new Yahoo Video product is launching tonight (Wednesday) at 9 pm PST. The big change? Yahoo Video is targeting YouTube by allowing user-generated videos on the site. The biggest disappointment? The product is not being integrated (yet) into Flickr. Yahoo Video will continue to allow major video publishers direct API access to the site, as well as crawling the web for relevant videos as well. But now, regular Internet users will have an easy way to upload videos and create their own video blog channel on Yahoo Video. The only limit on uploads is file size – each file cannot be larger than 100 MB – but there are no time, bandwidth or total storage limitations. Videos can be set to public or private, and viewers can search and sort videos by popularity, category (pre-defined by Yahoo) or tags (user created). Like YouTube, videos can be rated by viewers, commented on, embedded into other websites, etc. The biggest benefit to using Yahoo over other competitors may be the potential for exposure. Popular user generated videos will be periodically featured in a number of places on the new Yahoo home page when it launches. And unlike YouTube and other video sites, Yahoo is not going entirely with Flash. They’ve built the uploader tool from scratch, and the default player is Windows Media format. For Mac users and others unable to use this format, a Flash player will be used instead and automatically. The product is slick and will certainly be popular – partially because this is Yahoo, and partially because they’ve created an incredibly robust and complete video search tool with home grown videos and stuff crawled from the web. But what I really want is to see video upload functionality included directly into Flickr, a totally different user base. People will upload videos on Yahoo Video to get distribution and fame. People will upload videos to Flickr for sharing mostly with friends and family, and to have a safe long term place to store them. I’m much more interested in the latter. → Read More
