14 DAY TRIAL // It's actually a wonder people not in the loop have heard of it. The beta launch was announced just briefly, in a post on Yahoo!'s Technology Development Group's head, Bradley Horowitz's blog that had? three words: 'Live is live,' he said, and nothing more. For those waiting for it, the new service is both a blessing and, at the moment, a plague.
Doing everything it promised to do, like creating the profile from which you can afterward broadcast via webcam live, with participants and the embedding of these 'shows' around the web, it is a short-lived victory for Yahoo!. It has many downsides, and the fact that it is as stable as a mental patient that hasn't taken his pills in a while and is on the loose, is just the lesser of all.
Take for instance the fact that whatever is broadcast, is just there as you see it live, the files are not saved anywhere and made available for playback. Huge disappointment, if the Sunnyvale-based company is thinking about taking YouTube head on, it must back its will with some serious data storage capacity as well. On a side note, YT is also said to have a similar service to Yahoo! Live en route, bud it doesn't have a release date pinned to it.
In order to make it fly, Yahoo! hired, as far as I could see, a girl that will sing songs on request and Tech Crunch's Michael Arrington wrote that there was a second somebody, but the service crashed before I got a chance to find him or her. The whole failure problem was explained by Chad Dickerson, who wrote 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."
If you were to try the service out right now, all you'd get is a black screen with an apology note, but try it anyway. You might be lucky.