Michael over at Techcrunch gives a good write up on Yahoo Video, another video hosting site gunning for YouTube. In what’s turning into a crowded market place, Yahoo’s chances look good with the resources and personnel available to them since the Flickr acquisition. Interestingly Yahoo video is based around Microsoft’s Windows Media format and doesn’t just offer their own but aggregates video from other sites (just presumably not YouTube’s).
It’s a sensible move from Yahoo, establishing itself in the video market which will potentially become another form of revenue through advertising and paid video. Further as bandwidth becomes bigger the growth in this market will be immense as high quality video on demand becomes reality.
Thankfully though, they have stayed well away from integrating this into Flickr, which commercially would have been suicide. Flickr’s absolute success is directly proportional to the immense communities that have built up in since the beginning. Photography is a mature market and the Flickr audience is generally reflected in that but video is still in its infancy on the web. By combining both markets at this stage would have introduced the wrong audiences to this first rate photo sharing site and destroyed everything it has in its favour.
That is not to say it won’t be incorporated in the future but at this stage the Flickr fan base can sleep easy in the knowledge Yahoo will iron out the creases for a while and further gage the audience and usage before any potential integration. Hopefully….
