News.blog: Yahoo Live tries livestreaming

Last night, Yahoo dropped a new service on the world: the livestreaming service Yahoo Live. Conceptually it's very much like uStream and other livestream products. Anyone can set up a channel and embed the live player (though, oddly, not the text chat that goes with it) on their own page.

One of the really cool features of Yahoo Live is its multi-camera viewing panel. In addition to the video feed you tune in to, four other video channels -- of other users watching the same stream you are -- appear below the main video. You can jump to those channels quickly, and change the lineup of the secondary video channels by selecting names from the main video's chat window.

Yahoo is launching the service with an API, allowing people to mash up their own streaming video services. That's very cool, and unusually forthcoming. Most services don't go public with APIs, if ever, until the site has been live for a little while.

Unfortunately, Yahoo Live launched with a serious capacity deficit. I had the service go from functional to "our servers are smoking" several times when the user count broke about 800. Hey Yahoo: this is why the private beta was invented. If you don't want to put Yahoo-sized capacity into a new product, don't pretend that it's ready for a public viewing.

No word yet on how Google / YouTube will react, nor if a mobile version will appear.

See also: Justin.TV, Kyte, Qik, Flixwagon, Comvu, Mogulus and Operator11. Care to lay odds on which, if any, can survive independently, or which will get acquired by Google, Facebook or MySpace?

Track Yahoo Live's progress on the site's blog.