Yahoo! Video Relaunched, YouTube Competitor

What is Yahoo! thinking? One of the products it has worked best on was launched without any fanfare and mediums were kept mostly in the dark surrounding the event. Yang needed the attention to show the shareholders that he was head of a strong and organized company, not one that couldn't dwell on its best features.

Trying to copy Google's Video, probably, Yahoo!'s counterpart was supposed to be a showcase for professional content, while the user created videos were to be sent to Flickr, as Stewart Butterfield announced last summer.

Butterfield, Flickr co-founder, announced last summer that "soon" there will be video hosting options available for his creation, but soon afterward he got on the paternity train and took some time off. Playing the YouTube card might not prove to be as successful, because Google's video sharing service already has the fan base and it's not likely it will move to Flickr just for the fun of it. Yahoo! should probably try and capitalize on the fact that video and photos are now probably being shot with the same handheld device, so it would be a waste of time to browse to a different site to upload the output of one device.

Yahoo! Video is looking rather stylish, and the one thing I noticed it has above YouTube is color. If users are presented with the option to choose based on aspect, it would be a no-brainer.

After user-created content will be sorted out and taken somewhere else, Y! Video will be a Hulu contender with full rights. Or at least that is its reported intention, but reality will probably come to bite the Sunnyvale-based company in the behind, as it kind of did in the past two years. Nothing went the way it was supposed to, the only two products still flying their colors with pride being Yahoo! Mail and Flickr.