When I left Yahoo!, I mentioned that there were still two products from my team in development: Fire Eagle (still not launched) and an unnamed other one. Well, my team launched Yahoo! Live today.
Yahoo! Live allows anyone to stream their own live channel. If YouTube is what happened (past tense), Live is what’s happening right now. Each channel comes with its own chat room and a “co-viewing” area where you can see the other people who are watching.
It’s a pretty amazing product (even in this early “experimental release” phase) and one of those products that the more that you play with it, the more you want to. They’ve also launched with ability to embed into your own site and a nice API.
I’m proud that I was a part of it and I’m incredibly proud of the team. From what I read, they are chasing after some bugs and the initial reaction was more than they thought (pretty amazing to max out your beta servers with zero official press mentions), but I’m confident they’ll work through all that. It’s a truly amazing team.
Read more Mike Quoc’s post at Yahoo! Next for the details.
And P.S. while the press is loving to Sh*t on Yahoo! these days, this team shows they can still launch an interesting, innovative product. And if rumors are to be believed, Microsoft is trying to buy Ustream for $50mm. I suggest they save the money – if the MSFT/YHOO thing goes through, you’ve got a great team raring to go!