Profile: Yahoo! Video

Because it is one of the leading online video host websites, Yahoo! Video users might forget that the movie-hosting section is a year old, when compared to the long history of the search engine mogul.

History
The Sunnyville, Calif.-based company Yahoo! was founded in 1994 by David Filo and Jerry Yang, two Stanford University students who worked on their engineering project in a campus trailer.  While the search engine has certainly come a long way, continuing for more than decade, it wouldn’t be until June 2006 when it launched Yahoo! Video.

Yahoo! is currently putting the final touches on its pending TechTicker, an off-shoot of streaming video and blogs about technology stocks.  This isn’t the first time Yahoo! experimented with finance-oriented video.  Back in 2000, Yahoo! launched a streaming video program called FinanceVision that was later cancelled.  Adding to an already existing successful Finance section, analysts are calling TechTicker an aggressive move to set itself apart from major rival Google with the niche video channel.  Although primarily geared for financial professionals, the tech industry will be keeping a close eye on Yahoo!’s latest venture into online video.

[via The New York Times]

Optimal Video Format

Yahoo! Video recommends that video clips must be less than 100 MB in WMV, ASF, QT, MOD, MOV, MPEG, 3GP, 3GP, or AVI format with audio, although the site does not mention what is the ideal audio format.

EULA

Yahoo! Video has a standard Terms of Service agreement.  Users of the site must be age 13 or older, like most free online video-sharing sites.  Yahoo! prohibits pornography and offensive materials including racially objectionable content, according to the website. 

As far as content rights go, the producer retains ownership, although Yahoo! has royalty-free rights to host and distribute to third parties.  Yahoo! can display ads that run alongside your content, while retaining all the revenue from those advertisements.  That’s standard across most end-user agreements on free online video hosting sites.

Pros / Cons
Yahoo! Video has two, but significant, drawbacks, namely speed and image quality.  Even though movie size maxes out at 100 MB, the site has a painfully slow upload time.  It took more than 15 minutes to upload an 18-second clip (20 MB file).  Our test clip also was highly compressed with low picture quality.  To actually view the movie, we were then greeted with a voiceover that told us the clip was “unavailable.”

That said, Yahoo! Video has a simple, easy-to-navigate interface with manageable tools.  Contributors can upload with title, description, tags, and category fields, listed until the deceiving “Edit” function.  There are no actual video editing tools, only file name editing functions.  Sharing is easy because Yahoo! links to My Page, My Blog, My Friends, Mailbox, and Y! Messenger.  There is even a box for an avatar version of yourself for personalization.  Viewers can tag their Favorites, and rate, comment, and embed the content.

The final say is users who like only having to sign in once to their Yahoo! account for mail, chat, and movie uploading will find that Yahoo! Video is very easy to use, but mediocre performance might have them switching to a YouTube or another competing site. 

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The PROFILE series examines all the whatevers of uploading, viewing, and sharing.  We compare the pros and cons of the top hosting websites and some lesser-known sites.  Keep a lookout for more profiles and guides to come.