Yahoo Video picks a fight with YouTube and MySpace, or did they?
Today Yahoo announced the release of new updates to their Yahoo Video service. Rather than being a search portal only, they are now allowing more features that compete with MySpace and YouTube rather than Google. But they are also creating more ways for there product to integrate and work with MySpace and YouTube.

The Yahoo blog describes it as "An entirely new face to the product, starting with the home page. Try browsing for what’s new and of interest on the Web using Featured and Popular lists and Category and Tag pages." In that second sentence they refer to the ability to browse featured videos, by popularity, through categories and with tags. So that’s like Digg, YouTube, and Technorati all in one, and then some.

Some of the features that I am excited about in addition to the ability to upload user generated video directly (which Google does) are the more social aspects akin to Flickr like automatic channel creation for publishers "Just by uploading a single video, publishers begin creating their own individual channels. These can be saved to others’ Favorites page, or exported as a Media RSS feed and added to your My Yahoo! page or any other RSS reader"

You can also create a My Favorites channel to share with friends YouTube style, "Favorites can also be exported as a Media RSS feed, for those who subscribe and follow online content using an RSS reader or to share with friends"

Some of the other social features are summed up in the bottom of the post for sharing content through email, messenger, and not mentioned directly but inferred by "users can also copy and paste a player window into a blog or Web page" are integration into 360 and MySpace but only for user uploaded content.

As far as getting more content indexed than anyone else, they are certainly working for it with "more user submitted Media-RSS feeds, direct feeds from major video publishers, and video crawled from Web. Combined with user-uploaded content..."

At this point, how far are we really from sitting down at the end of a long day and rather than tuning into our pre-recorded network television programs on our Yahoo Go Media DVR we hit up Yahoo Video or 360 and check out our buddy Garrett's video favorites feed for our evening of programming and vegetation.

I think that real questions for the immediate future are that now that Yahoo is allowing user generated content upload, will YouTube and MySpace also allow Yahoo to include their videos in search results and will MySpace allow the viewing of Yahoo Video in their site like they currently do with YouTube. How is this all affected by the MySpace Google talks everyone is speculating about.

What do you think?

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Adam Schultz - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |