Yahoo is coming on strong. They have been buying companies left and right, snapping up Google developers, and making some big moves to get back to a place of relevance in our lives. Their next move is going to be a video service to challenge YouTube, if a report from Ad Age is to be believed. The future of media is online video, as YouTube, Vimeo, and others have proven. Yahoo wants a piece of that action.
Yahoo is going to attract content creators by offering more money that YouTube does. They want to share more ad revenue with their partners. They’re also supposedly going to be offering a fixed ad rate that is 50-100 percent higher than YouTube’s current rate. Both of these sound great for content makers, but what’s the hold up? Yahoo wants too much control.
The company wants to get perpetual licensing for any videos that are shared on Tumblr. That would basically mean that Yahoo gets the rights to any video shared on their micro-blogging platform. Obviously, users aren’t happy about that point. Creators would be able to share their videos on multiple platforms, though. They wouldn’t be locked into just using Yahoo’s video service. Yahoo also wants to make videos downloadable so users of the service can watch them later. This is another point that is causing content makers some concern. These issues will all need to be fixed if Yahoo wants to launch the service by this summer.
Yahoo is also on the hunt for original content that they could broadcast on their own version of Netflix. Yahoo has been upping their app game, too, with new apps like News Digest. Yahoo News Digest takes the big stories and info from around the internet and condenses them into bite size pieces that you can intake quickly. Like their Weather app, News Digest is very well designed and aesthetically appealing. A Yahoo video service is likely to be just as well designed, but whether or not it will catch on with video makers and users is something that remains to be seen.