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 