Yahoo’s Brickhouse Not So Mighty Mighty

Nov 3rd, 2008 | By | Category: Internet TV, Streaming Video, Video

Yahoo! LiveYahoo!’s Brickhouse team has announced that the company will be killing off Yahoo! Live, a live video conferencing service:

Our mission here on the Brickhouse team is to quickly develop product ideas that can add value to Yahoo! as a whole. To do this effectively we constantly evaluate our early-stage products and sometimes have to make the hard decision to move on, in order to continue exploring new territory and developing new products.

So it is with great sadness that I share the news that Yahoo! Live, a Brickhouse project in social broadcasting, will be going off the air on 3 December 2008.

We’d like to thank everyone who has participated. Without all of you, Y!Live would not have built the strong community that it has. It has been really interesting (and entertaining) to see all of the ways broadcasters have used Live, developing it into a place for all sorts of social interactions.

We hope you can join us in our town hall this Wednesday to toast Yahoo! Live.  

We tried out Yahoo! LIve early on and promptly broke it. When it was introduced, we said:

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 Screen Capture

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.

Yahoo! never threw its weight behind it, though, and now it’s headed to the deadpool.

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