When Yahoo! launched its live video streaming service, Y! Live, to the world earlier this year, it was admittedly an “experiment in live video” designed to elicit feedback from the market. Today, Yahoo! has decided that the experiment has received enough feedback – or perhaps too little. They’re going to be closing the service down on December 3.
Here at ReadWriteWeb, we’ve remained proponents of live streaming video, claiming more than once that it is “going to be huge.” If that’s the case, why is Yahoo! pulling the plug on Y! Live so quickly?
One answer might be the competition. Yahoo! has seen little traction from its user base for the service during a period when services like UStream and Mogulus seem to be growing exponentially. Midway through Yahoo!’s Y! Live experiment, for example, UStream – one of the leaders in the space – boasted nearly 10 million unique viewers per month for its live video streams.
And then there’s the slumbering giant that is the promise of YouTube’s live streaming.
Long story short, Y! Live never really gained enough of a following to warrant the Brickhouse team continuing to spend development resources on it, according to today’s announcement:
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 where will the Brickhouse team be focusing their efforts now? It’s a safe bet that current Brickhouse darling fire eagle – a service that helps users share their location information with others – will be garnering more attention, especially with the ever growing popularity of geo-aware devices and software entering the market, these days.
And there’s always the chance that another Yahoo! experiment will get the green light. What might that be? We’ll just have to stay tuned to Yahoo! Next* to see.
