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Yahoo! Launches YouTube Competitor 120

Posted by Zonk
from the glad-to-forget-realplayer dept.
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."

Yahoo! Launches YouTube Competitor

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  • MSN Video!? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 01, 2006 @01:37PM (#15446713)
    When the hell did that come about?

    Honsetly... I've only heard of Google and YouTube so far.

    • Re:MSN Video!? (Score:3, Informative)

      by goldaryn (834427)
      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%
      • They must be defining 'audience' differently than the other sites... i've never gotten an MSN video link or even heard of it.
    • "When the hell did that come about?"

      Damn, I thought exactly the same thing when I read the blurb!

    • by schon (31600)
      Hmm, I just went there, and it said I need to "install free software".

      It didn't work, and all my software is already Free.
    • Re:MSN Video!? (Score:3, Informative)

      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.
  • download (Score:5, Informative)

    by joe 155 (937621) on Thursday June 01, 2006 @01:37PM (#15446716) Journal
    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.
    • Re:download (Score:3, Informative)

      by Ossifer (703813)
      Well, if you have mplayer, you can download any stream using the -dumpstream option, and then play it whenever you like...
      • I am intrigued by your ideas, sir, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

        I was actually unaware of that feature but I'm pretty new to mplayer; I will have to look up all the features it has
      • These are flash files streaming .flv video though. Can you use mplayer to download those? The thing about Google is that it lets you download the higher quality AVI or whatever format it is.
        • You're correct, however that wasn't my point. My point was that if you could download something directly and later watch it using mplayer, you could also download the streaming version using mplayer.
      • Shouldn't HAVE to do that though, and in that respect, the new Yahoo service sucks. They started going downhill in the 90's and nothing they have done recently changes that. All of their services come with too many strings attached, or poor performance, or both, and any service you actually pay them for is apt to have the rug pulled out from under it at any time. They need to focus on doing a few things very well instead of trying to compete with everyone on everything. They suffer from the same control
        • They suffer from the same control-freak syndrome and Microsoft (and Apple to a lesser extent) and the results will be the same.
          You mean they'll make billions of dollars, evade government regulation, and ruthlessly crush all competition despite having an inferior product?
    • Exactly. I always download the iPod video files from google video. These play beautifully in VLC, no need for the Google video client.
    • Try Keepvid.com (Score:3, Informative)

      by Comboman (895500)
      I can't see a way to download the videos to you[r] HD

      Go to Keepvid.com [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.

    • This seems to be trivial to accomplish (and this is information that livehttpheaders provides easily).

      Take movie URL, for example - http://video.yahoo.com/video/play?vid=a2be3e951f3 f 19e690b3500ed2fe19dc.477060 [yahoo.com].

      Note down the nodeID (i.e 477060). Use curl to download the playlist path.

      bash$ curl "http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/getPlaylistemb.php?n ode_id=477060&tech=wmp&bitrate=754"
      pl=http%3A%2F %2Fplaylist.yahoo.com%2Fmakeplaylist.dll%3Fsid%3D2 5469505%26ticket%3D0%26s%3D0%26start%3D0%26en

    • Well, that's the difference: as much as I dislike Google, they just got it right: Google Video offers easy download.
      Fortunately for all the other video services there is the UnPlug Firefox Extension [geocities.com].
  • Is there ANY market segment where Yahoo! isn't playing second-fiddle to somebody else?
  • Seriously. Yahoo isn't doing this to earn money. They know video online is already crowded to the lid, they are only doing this to over crowd the market so nobody will have a strong hold of the market.

    Good business sense, but does nothing for customers, we already have more then enough choices, more only pollute this field in my opinion
    • Not really... (Score:2, Informative)

      by Graboid (975267)
      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 keep
      • Your point is well taken, but I'm talking about their motivation. Perhaps it was not fair to say they are doing this to overcrowd the market, since everyone is sdoing the same thing. MSN/Google/Yahoo are all trying to get into each other business as much as possible. And I do agree their interface is a lot better then when Google video first came out (Can anyone agree with me? Google video have the worst start of any of their products, by far?) but I disgree that they need to gathers all the customes.

        I u
    • 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 all we want is a video clip to download. I fully agree

        But the big picture is, eventually, internet will replace tradition TV, do you think a bunch of tiny players in the market can fight the Tradition TV station better, or a few bigger player?

        It is debatable, but I have a feeling this will make it worst for us in the long run.
    • by geoffspear (692508) on Thursday June 01, 2006 @01:47PM (#15446819) Homepage
      Insightful? What are the moderators smoking today?

      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.

      • 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
        • That's like saying having over 100 cable channels would make it impossible for cable to take on the broadcast networks, and that cable would have been more successful if there was just one channel available, but it was run by some really huge company.

          People will not abandon traditional media if there's no choice in new media.

          And even if you think internet video delivery requires a big force behind it, how could you possibly think that YouTube should be more successful than Yahoo!? Yahoo! is a publically t

          • Not entirely true.

            It is more like saying. "Ok, someone need to sign us to get the agreement to broadcast our hugely populor show. Now... should we sign it with (insert your big broadcasting company name here) or should we give it to one of those guys on the internet...?"*

            You are right if there are no new media else where, people won't move else where. But you are wrong in assuming that small player have as much power to shows producure comparing to the like of ABC/Fox/CNN etc. If I have a popular show
      • Internet businesses usually have big problems with getting enough marketshare to be sucessful (making money). Google ran for a few years without making any money, and there's a lot of other high profile internet companies which are doing the same even now. Vonage is fighting court battles, isps, and general apathy for voip to try to turn a dollar, and they're still losing big. YouTube is also losing money so far. Of course Yahoo makes money from their portal, search engine, email, etc... but they are lo
        • You're right. I take back everything I said.

          Yahoo has no chance whatsoever of attracting visitors to their website. Excuse my extreme ignorance of the Internet. I can only take solace in the fact that the people at Alexa.com are as dumb as I am.

  • Flash 7 or 8? (Score:5, Informative)

    by orkysoft (93727) <orkysoft@myrealbox.OPENBSDcom minus bsd> on Thursday June 01, 2006 @01:43PM (#15446773) Journal
    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 mean, on what area should one compete with them?
  • by ImaNihilist (889325) on Thursday June 01, 2006 @01:44PM (#15446790)
    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 know I am weird but - I actually don't want the illegal content. I can find commercial programming on television.

      The reason I go to youtube is precisely to see user generated "grassroots" content.

      No, it's not generally fine art, but it is often funny and interesting. It's what the internet is all about.
  • Loaded up a few vids.. all they do is point to ANOTHER site... what is the point of this service then?
  • by Whammy666 (589169) on Thursday June 01, 2006 @01:51PM (#15446862) Homepage
    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.
    • Without flash, how do you watch Homestar Runner?
    • I've kept myself from banning Flash, because I've noticed that is a video distribution medium quite many start to agree on. Sure, you can ban all sorts of mediums and codecs, but then you won't get much video at all. :-p To get decent coverage, focus just on a few (1-3 or so) that's common.
    • How is FLV [wikipedia.org] a new or non-established codec? (you missed the train on complaining about that a while ago...) Also, how is it a good thing if a super-low-bitrate video is re-encoded (a second time) into another low-bitrate codec?
      • How is FLV a new or non-established codec?

        Newer FLV files use VP6, which requires Flash Player 8, which isn't available for Linux or any platform other than Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X.

  • Not new (Score:3, Interesting)

    by objekt (232270) on Thursday June 01, 2006 @01:54PM (#15446887) Homepage
    this is the same as http://video.search.yahoo.com/ [yahoo.com] which I've had bookmarked for months already.
  • Vimeo [vimeo.com] is really the only video sharing service that doesn't look like it took a page out of myspace's design book, i.e. it doesn't look horrible, like youtube, yahoo pages etc. I mean, come on, Yahoo even looks identical in its colorscheme to myspace. I mean, they have the flickr team behind them now! How can they let something this awful in appearance come out of their shop?
  • by suv4x4 (956391) on Thursday June 01, 2006 @02:03PM (#15446991)
    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..).
    • Vimeo has also converted to Flash, from QuickTime.
    • There's also Guba, a site that downloads videos from Usenet and converts them to Flash.

      In retrospect, it makes sense. Flash is small and easy to install, so it has huge market share. And it loads fast, has a modern codec, and allows the player to be customized, so Web developers like it.


      It was pretty clear the first time I watched a Flash video. Normally, when I watch video on a website, the procedure goes something like this:

      1. Click on the link with Opera under Linux.

      2. Read the error message.

      3. Curse.

      4. Try the download the video. Notice that the link is a Javascript call. Curse again.

      5. Switch to a Windows system.

      6. Go the the websi

      • It was pretty clear the first time I watched a Flash video.

        Yes, I kinda meant before video was part of Flash ;)

        I'm happy you're happy with Flash. Flash 9 for Linux (with F8 support) is coming pretty soon, can't wait myself.
  • Hotlinking disaster (Score:4, Informative)

    by AIX-Hood (682681) on Thursday June 01, 2006 @02:11PM (#15447080)
    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.
  • by Chalex (71702) on Thursday June 01, 2006 @02:14PM (#15447106) Homepage
    There's another video site called Blit.tv. The difference? They promise to offer their video encoded with a Free and open codec. [theinquirer.net]
  • by MikeRT (947531) on Thursday June 01, 2006 @02:18PM (#15447147) Homepage
    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.
  • Does this one allow porn?
  • The current Yahoo video site has a major difference:

    It searches the entire web for videos, not just community uploaded videos. I just searched for a video and got directed to a semi-porn site for that video.

    Youtube and Google are quite different in the sense that
    1. Only user uploaded videos are available, its not just a web video search
    2. The video plays within the site, using Flash. No such thing on Yahoo, the whole video experience sucks

  • Come on Yahoo, to compete with the others, you need to offer something they don't do.

    It is time to unlock the holy grail of video broadcasting.

    The unfailing solution.

    It is time to allow porn uploads! :-)
  • Even though the main bulk of the browser window is eaten awaying by an expected Flash plugin, you still have the option to download a real video. This is the most fustrating thing about YouTube and Yahoo; they _require_ Flash to view the content. I'm not installing Flash for a variety of reasons. I never really understood why some people cling onto Flash as if its the savior, the only thing that it seemed to be good for was annoying people and advertisement.
    • I second this, and also wish sites would degrade gracefully for lack of other tech such as Java, I mean I can't even get Java for sparc/linux (WTF?).

      And yes I realise most people use intel machines running windows, and that probably less than .1% of people run linux for sparc, but the whole friggin' point of www and w3c standards is that sites should be viewable regardless of the browser/os/whatever.

      Also WTF doesn't youtube etal. allow you to download the videos. many people (not me) don't have access to in
    • The problem with Google is that even when you download the video straight, it doesn't tell you how long it is so you don't know when it's going to finish.

      And when you download it with Firefox, if you cancel it half way through it deletes the bit you've already downloaded! Pretty frustrating when you've been downloading for two hours.
  • I don't like the idea of using subdomains to host large projects compare video.yahoo.com auctions.yahoo.com....to youtube.com ebay.com. I think yahoo would have alot more success if they made their services have both an internal and external prescense.

    Photo Upload Download
    http://photoud.com/ [photoud.com]
  • ...that they'd call it YAHOOTUBE.

    They didn't. Bastards.

  • there are more site than just those there are http://www.stickam.com/ [stickam.com], http://vsocial.com/ [vsocial.com], http://www.gofish.com/ [gofish.com] http://grouper.comhttp//www.blip.tv/ [grouper.comhttp], http://eyespot.com/ [eyespot.com], http://www.bolt.com/ [bolt.com], http://jumpcut.com/ [jumpcut.com], http://ourmedia.org/ [ourmedia.org], http://revver.com/ [revver.com] http://vimeo.com/ [vimeo.com], http://www.videoegg.com/ [videoegg.com], http://clipshack.com/ [clipshack.com], http://www.dailymotion.com/ [dailymotion.com], http://castpost.com/ [castpost.com], http://www.blinkx.com/ [blinkx.com] now what do u say about google video, youtube and the new yahoo one i say there is plent of them ou there for c
  • AOL's UnCut Video? It launched a few weeks ago

    http://communityvideo.aol.com/Main.do/ [aol.com]
  • Youtube is hacked lmfao it says: [youtube logo] ALL YOUR VIDEO ARE BELONG TO US.
  • Yahoo! still can't seem to get with the program of that of Google Video or YouTube.

    Yahoo! is still using old-and-busted technology that is only avaiable for one operating system. GV and YT use Flash as the medium of choice. It can be accessable on Macintosh, Unix, and Linux operating systems. Windows Video may be avaiable, but the codecs are separate, and a real hassle to install if you have Unix or Linux.

    Yahoo! fails to deliver video as it does with LaunchCast to the growing number of people who are n
