Last night Yahoo!, without much fanfare, launched Yahoo! Video which, as I'm sure you've guessed, is its answer to sites like Google Video and YouTube. Yahoo! Video replaces the old video search service and still indexes videos from across the web, but the new service's focus is on user-uploaded videos. It occupies a middle ground between Google Video and YouTube, offering more features than Google Video like user ratings and comments, "channels" with subscription features, and tagging (though download functionality is missing), and skipping much of the complexity of YouTube. Uploaded videos and videos on the web at large are all rolled into one, which has advantages and disadvantages. You can still comment and rate on web videos, which is nice, but in order to actually watch them you'll have to click through to wherever they're hosted, which can be obnoxious. Overall, though, the service is clean and impressive and I think it will fare better than other services which have tried to nose in on the YouTube/Google space. You can read more about the launch at the Yahoo! Search Blog.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
6-03-2006 @ 12:13AM
Ivan Lubiano said...
It is interesting to see how effective this service from Yahoo! will be competing against YouTube and Google Video.
I believe that they are at a disadvantage from the start, because of one thing: Mindshare. YouTube and Google already have the Mindshare, people already associate video uploads with those sites. So now it becomes not just a battle of featuresets and interfaces, and such. Yahoo! now faces the uphill battle to chip away at the MASSIVE amount of mindshare (in my opinion) that YouTube already has over them.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
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6-04-2006 @ 12:45PM
Samuel said...
Online tagging is one thing, and a good thing. But inserting meta-data is quite another and I for one am fed up of poeple ignoring it. Sure there is no download feature, but their will be and even Google is not encouraging meta-data tagging of files - its almost hopeless.
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