Yahoo! Live (2008 - 2008)

2008 - 2008

dead us

yahoo opened a webcam broadcasting site on 6 february 2008 and it fell over the same evening, because there was not enough bandwidth standing behind it. the product was a channel per person with a chat box beside the video, built at the exact moment every company on earth wanted one of those. the end was announced on 3 november and the site closed a month later at 7:07 in the evening, leaving the word kthxbai on the front page. ten months from preview to epitaph.

» see live.yahoo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Ten months is not long enough to reach Turkey. In 2008 the chat window on every screen I knew was MSN, the way it had been since school. yahoo's presence in the country was a mail address and a messenger a few people kept installed for one contact who refused to switch. A live video experiment that opened in february and closed in december never crossed any of that. either way. I found out it existed years later, reading about something else.

this is mostly told from the outside (dont quote me on that). to be honest. Yahoo opened it on 6 february 2008 as a limited preview and it collapsed the same night under its own traffic, with not enough bandwidth provisioned to serve the people who turned up to look. That was five days after Microsoft had made a public offer to buy the whole company (dont quote me on that). the launch happened in the middle of the loudest week Yahoo had had in years, which is either very good timing or the worst possible timing.

The product itself was a copy and did not pretend otherwise. You made a channel and pointed the browser at your webcam. broadcast to anyone who found you, while viewers watched in a window with a chat box down the side and could join in with a camera of their own. back then. Justin.tv had shipped exactly that in '07 and Ustream had shipped it too, along with Stickam and a half dozen others, because live video in those two years was the thing every company was told it needed.

~ the chronicle ~

Born	6 february 2008, as a limited preview
Peak	a live channel for anyone with a webcam, for about a week
Killed	3 december 2008, 7:07pm eastern
Lifespan	ten months
Made by	Yahoo!
Killed by	Yahoo deciding it was not a Yahoo product

~ ten months ~

this happened more in the english speaking internet than where i was, nothing dramatic happened in between. It worked, after the first night. People broadcast the things people broadcast at a webcam in 2008, which was mostly themselves in a bedroom talking to whoever showed up. It never found a reason for anyone to pick it over the sites that had been doing the same job for a year already. yahoo never gave it one.

i saw this from a distance, mostly. The announcement came on 3 november 2008 and set the closing date a month out. That was two weeks after the company had cut ten percent of its staff, in the same stretch that killed a long list of Yahoo properties nobody at the top could explain the purpose of any more (give or take). though, yahoo in late 2008 was a company deciding what it was. a webcam site with no lead over Justin.tv was an easy paragraph in that memo.

~ the funny part ~

It went off at 7:07 in the evening, eastern time, on 3 december '08. Whoever had the keys put the word kthxbai on the front page and walked away. That is internet slang from a specific and now quite distant era, roughly the sound of shrugging while leaving. by then. it is the only genuinely memorable thing the service ever produced (give or take).

this part i was not really around for, but anyway, the idea was correct, (if memory serves). A channel per person with a chat box next to it is Twitch, which was assembled out of the wreckage of Justin.tv six years later and is now most of what live video means. more or less. Yahoo had the traffic to do it and put the product up before the technology or its own attention span could carry it. The epitaph fits: not a failure exactly, just a company saying bye without capital letters.

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