Yahoo! Intros New Live Video Service And We Promptly Break It
Feb 7th, 2008 | By James Lewin | Category: Internet TV, Podcasting Research, Streaming Video, Video 
Yahoo! today introduced a new live video conferencing service, Yahoo! Live.
We haven’t seen an official announcement yet; we learned about this from ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick via Twitter.
Kirkpatrick’s take:
The service combines many of the best practices developed by early explorers of the medium, tiny startups that must be very worried tonight. Part BlogTV, part Mogulus and just plain better than UStream – below is a live player and some key points of differentiation.
At this point, the service is far from ready for prime time. In testing it out, we got a variety of interesting messages, such as this:
Yahoo! Live also told us “You can continue to surf and chat; video will resume once our servers stop smoking.”
We’re not sure what they were smoking, but it seems to keep them from being able to handle a few hundred beta users.
When we have been able to connect, we found Yahoo! Live to be a buggy video conferencing service. With Yahoo!’s weight and audience behind it, though, it could soon be a video service to contend with.
Live video is more about the community, you know?
Chris – Yahoo! Live looks like it’s aiming at the community video chat space, with the ability to embed the video in sites, also. But it’s not ready for the community part yet.
Video conferencing can cut costs and improve communication but, like any other technology, it must be used properly. That means effectively dealing with holdouts and setting reasonable rules