For the fortunate few who caught Rob Glaser’s brief Y! Live stream from an Obama rally in Seattle, you know what a cool moment it was. We made a last minute decision to hop over to Dallas to catch one of Obama’s final rallies of this primary season, and will be streaming the event citizen-broadcast-style in its entirety for you all at the Y! Live Obama08 channel. Provided we make it through tightened security with enough computer parts to put together a broadcast, we’ll be live - hope to see you there.
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Come to the Trackrunners channel on Sunday, March 2 at 7pm PT / 10pm ET - they will be in-studio, and ready to lay down a track, together with you. The Trackrunners and Inhouse Records came to us with this brilliant concept for a collaborative, social recording session:
- You tune into Y! Live Trackrunners channel and suggest topics for them to create a hip hop song about
- Trackrunners will compose the music and record the vocals in real time
- As a final touch, they will immediately post an mp3 for the audience to download for free, instantly
We think this will be a lot of fun, as well as a chance to experience truly collaborative, social music creation. Come join the good times! Join the Y! Live twitter feed to receive alerts for this and other live events.
Amazing broadcast today from the Hyper Island art school in Stockholm. They streamed a live interactive mural painting session, where they took feedback and requests from viewers on Y! Live and created the mural in real-time with the audience. They also took off one piece of clothing every time the viewer count passed a new milestone. Thankfully, we only got down to no t-shirts.
Starting at midnight, for the next 24 hours, random people and celebrities alike will get married, in Vegas, in front of a worldwide audience on the interweb. Yahoo and Dr. Pepper are inviting anyone to come to the Hard Rock Hotel this Valentine’s Day to get married or renew their vows in proper Vegas style. The event will be streamed at the Yahoo! Valentine’s in Vegas website, and a special social broadcast on Y! Live will be run in parallel. So come on in and join the party, it runs all throughout the day!
Thanks to everyone who’s been broadcasting with us! The last 5 days have been great - we’re amazed at the talent and interesting ideas we’ve seen all over the site. Singers, guitarists, DJ’s, comedians - it’s been hard to tear ourselves away from watching you to get some real work done! Shout out to hotpuppets for the best dancing skills in the puppet category. Lavalamp - very cool idea and nice visual impact. And congrats to Aquarium for being the first aquarium broadcast on Y! Live (we’re sure you won’t be the last!). Some screens from the past few days:
We always knew politics would be a great use case for Y! Live - we just didn’t expect it to be on our first day after launch! Rob Glaser, CEO of Real Networks, streamed an Obama rally in Seattle to a live audience on Y! Live just a few minutes ago. Thanks Rob for streaming it for us, and thanks to Kent Brewster for providing the audio feed - I have to say, it was an amazing moment for us all.
Kent has some additional screenshots.
Also, Silicon Alley Insider picked up the story and embedded the broadcast on their blog.
Y! Live’s first night was quite a ride. We had some killer performances from JT the Bigga Figga, Sheena Melwani, David Choi, Tilly Key, DJ Buzzkill and more - props to all of you, we all had a blast hanging out with you!
We also saw our site go through some intermittent outages as traffic surged late into the evening. We’ve been researching it and have identified some key improvements we need to make to make the site run more smoothly - we’re working hard to implement those now. We hope to have the site up and running much more smoothly in the morning.
One thing to keep in mind is that although this product comes from Yahoo! (a big company), the team working on Y! Live is only six people deep. We’re a really tiny incubation group which is tasked with building innovative new products and get them out there ASAP. Our mantra is to iterate and build with the community, as opposed to unveiling The Next Big Thing on Day One. We hope you collaborate with us as we shape Y! Live into a game-changing product.
We’re excited to share with you Yahoo! Live, a new experiment in live video from the Advanced Products team at Yahoo!. Y! Live was dreamed up as a way to make it possible for anyone to create their own live video experience. Broadcast the concert you’re at. Webcast your own live DJ set. Lifecast. Build your own live video speed dating application. We’ve created a website and an API that lets you do all these things and many more.
For viewers: How is Y! Live different from other online video sites? That’s simple: it’s live. What you’re watching, right now, is what other people are watching, right now. We wanted to create an experience that takes us back to live television, where things are happening now, in real time.
For broadcasters: You’ve been posting your stuff to MySpace and YouTube. Now, connect with your fans in real time on Y! Live. There is something intangible about a live performance – an excitement that you can’t replicate in pre-recorded format. Broadcast a performance, interact with your fans with video and chat, embed your broadcast anywhere - it’s all possible on Y! Live.
For developers: Check out our developer preview of our API and embeddable components, and well as a sample app and tutorial we threw together. We’re looking for your feedback at this point, and will be incorporating it as we get to version 1.0 of our API in the coming months. Play around with it and let us know what you think. We’re always interested in seeing what you’ve built, and we’ll feature cool stuff you build on our site.
Keep in mind that Y! Live is an experimental release. The Advanced Products team is a small incubation team at Yahoo! – our mission is to build stuff and launch it quickly, and respond to market feedback. Y! Live is a limited capacity release, so bear with us as and we may reach our limits in periods of high traffic. Our top priority now is to hear your feedback – send your comments to ylive-contact (at] yahoo-inc (dot] com, and follow our twitter feed to hear about headline broadcasts and notable things happening live.
Special thanks to JT the Bigga Figga of Mandatory Business and Ricky Montalvo putting that Y! Live intro video together. And big props to the Y! Live team: Eric, Matt, Keith, David, and Premshree - these guys seriously cranked to get this thing built and launched in six months.
Michael Quoc
Director, Advanced Products
