Update: Chad replies in comments below from the Yahoo Live team and I certainly agree that the rumors of the death of of Live were greatly exaggerated.
Yahoo strikes again with what looked like a neat application – live streaming video for everybody – but woefully inadequate capacity to handle the huge interest in the beta. The application sounds promising – you plug in your camcorder and start streaming live onto the web via your Yahoo Live account. Although several other places have these services, Yahoo has the huge population and umm … server capacity … to make this work for the millions of people who’ll be interested in chatting in this fashion.
Hmm – not sure if I should be warming up to the video socializing idea I viewed skeptically earlier in the year, though as I noted before I’m not at all bullish on the monetization potential of this type of communication, let alone monetization of video clips like those at Youtube – only the best “shows” with clever, engaging, or sexy people will do well in that regard, but I think this is another aspect of globalized social networking that is the new online paradigm.
Who projects server capacity over there? Based on the current home page of Yahoo live it appears it is only handling a few thousand streams when the thing went down.
Matt’s got a play by play of the death of Yahoo live.
Joe Duck 
Hi Joe,
We’re just getting started, so I think (to butcher a Mark Twain quote), “the rumors of our death have been greatly exaggerated.” A lot of people seemed to have missed the disclaimer about Yahoo! Live that we posted on the Yahoo! Next blog before we pushed this out:
“Keep in mind that Y! Live is an experimental release. The Advanced Products team is a small incubation team at Yahoo! – our mission is to build stuff and launch it quickly, and respond to market feedback. Y! Live is a limited capacity release, so bear with us as and we may reach our limits in periods of high traffic. Our top priority now is to hear your feedback. . . ”
Thanks for the feedback, and stay tuned!
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Hi Chad – thanks for the update. I have enormous respect for your team, which has been doing superb work over the past several years. However for future releases I’d recommend that you find some way to keep the lid on activity until servers can be scaled up as needed. This might be as simple as asking the major tech blogs like TechCrunch to link out to descriptions rather than the applications.
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