Yahoo’s new services

Yahoo is making a splash with a new service designed to rival established video sites and an eye-opening anthropological project.

Hot on the heels of services like YouTube and Google Video (Google has, incidentally, bought YouTube), Yahoo has launched the Australian arm of its own video uploading and sharing site, Yahoo!7 Video. This follows the June 1st 2006 launch of Yahoo! Video in the US.

Unlike YouTube, Yahoo’s video catalogue isn’t format specific. The videos are sourced from Yahoo’s web crawls are streamed from their original locations, instead of being stored on Yahoo’s servers. User uploaded clips stream in Flash from Yahoo’s servers, and can be rated, categorized and embedded in HTML code.

We spoke to Ricki Mulia, Head of Communications and Network Services at Yahoo7 about the several methods being used to keep piracy to a minimum. It turns out that a team of screeners review videos that have been viewed over a certain number of times, uploads are limited to 100MB and content that breaks copyright is removed within 24 to 48 hours of being reported.

What makes Yahoo different from YouTube is its partnership with Channel 7, which is set to provide regionalized content for the service. This is not the first time Yahoo has flexed the muscle of this corporate relationship. The funerals of Steve Irwin and Peter Brock, covered by Channel 7, were fed through to Yahoo and streamed three weeks ago.

Seeing where this partnership goes should be interesting. Currently, Seven makes news clips, recaps and extra programme footage available online, but we don’t know what the future will hold.

Channel Seven has tried new media ventures before, in the form of C7, a series of sports channels carried on the Optus Cable TV network. It folded to News Corporation’s Fox Sports under suspicious circumstances, and the case is currently in front of the courts.

Yahoo also launched their Time Capsule project, where users can upload a cross section of life in 2006 in the form of personal pictures, writing, music and videos to a Yahoo server.

A very spiffy Flash page is displaying submissions from around the world, and is open until the 9th of November. A selection of entries will be projected onto The Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacán in Mexico from the 26th to the 28th of October, after which they will be removed from Yahoo’s site and made live again in the year 2020.