Yahoo, apparently unfazed by the acquisition hullabaloo, turns out what is the first answer from the multi-billion dollar tech players to the UStream-style embedded video world. A quiet launch of Yahoo! Live took place this evening, and was described on their developer network blog as "an experiment in personal live video broadcasting."
Concurrent to the launch of the service itself, Yahoo launched an API, albeit a pre-1.0 API. Within the API are two parts, the AJAX/Javascript side, for controlling the object embeds, and the REST API, used for determining what broadcasts and channels are available on the service.
The whole service is very much pre-beta, not just the API. The streaming system appeared to work reasonably for broadcasting, up until the point they apparently ran out of bandwidth. On the other hand, the referenced Yahoo! Live blog and directory of sample applications are mysteriously absent.
After playing with the system for a bit, the features seem a bit fuller than most of the other systems out there. There is an interactivity to the system greater than Operater11, in terms of video streams available from the audience. The design is as slick as Justin.TV. The chat system and video windows are as portable as with UStream. Those are the finer points of the system.Unfortunately, it doesn't presently seem to have a mechanism in place for recording streamed sessions. It doesn't have any of the live compositing features of Mogulus, and it doesn't seem capable of handling more than a few hundred concurrent connections, as about 45 minutes from launch, frequent downtimes and service interruptions started.