Yahoo! revamps Video

By Steve Malone

Posted on 2 Jun 2006 at 10:23

Yahoo has upgraded its Yahoo! Video service to bring in many more 'community' features. The overhaul brings Yahoo! Video much closer towards the kind of functionality offered by rival services such as YouTube and to a lesser extent Google Video.

Until now, the Yahoo video service was similar to the images service - a simple list of videos relating to a single keyphrase crawled from the Web. However, services like YouTube, Google Video and indeed Yahoo's own Flickr picture sharing service showed that visitors want to be able to upload their own videos and share and discuss them.

YouTube is a Net phenomenon. Founded just over a year ago in February 2005, the service now streams 40 million videos to its visitors every day. The advertising potential of this market will not have escaped Yahoo!

The revamped service features a new interface and features including New, Featured and Popular lists and Category and Tag pages. It also offers a new range of content, such as more user submitted Media-RSS feeds and direct feeds from major video publishers alongside the video gleaned from its web crawlers. It also introduces the concept of 'channels' that allows you to get a series of videos from the same source or user. There are also areas such as My Favourites which allow you to store links to videos and channels and 'My Studio' that allows users to upload their own work.

Interestingly, the terms and conditions prohibit uploading 'pornographic' videos - traditionally accessible on the service through the web content - which also brings it into line with YouTube.