[billturner]

This is really quite sad. In 1999, Yahoo bought the streaming media company (not just video, but radio/sports/original content/etc) I worked for, broadcast.com. They then proceeded to slowly drive the property into the ground, to where now, there's so little of it left it's pathetic.

If they had really grasped on to what we were doing back then, and ran with it, Yahoo would have come out ahead of YouTube, Google Video, and, I could imagine, many of the current streaming radio players out there now (lastfm, rdio, etc).

But that didn't happen. They silently killed off what they spent so much on to buy.

[staunch]

No, they would not have. Nothing Broadcast.com did offered any advantage in creating something like YouTube.

Broadcast.com was almost 10 years ahead of its time and probably would not have survived on its own. Yahoo made one of the worst acquisitions in history and then did the smart thing by cutting their losses.

Until around 2005 (when Flash Player 7 implemented progressive streaming) there was no good way to stream video on the internet and not enough users with broadband to build a big business around it.

YouTube was created at exactly the right moment, by a startup, which is how it would have happened regardless of what Yahoo did.

[Terretta]

4 paragraphs:

1a) i dont know, but I'm sure some of these other points aren't right

1b) true, in the official product offering, but scaffolding was there

2a) false and true (thanks to burn rate and earlier assertion being false)

2b) true (price required plan not supported after purchase) and true

3a) false (multibitrate Windows Media was fantastic with a great video and audio codec, while Flash was plain bad till H.264), and in the years you say there wasn't demand, we built a similar business that routinely helped customers reach hundreds of thousands or even millions of viewers at a profit for them and a profit for us.

4a) YouTube (non-essential/comedy/ugc content being perfect for a ubiquitous animation player supporting a crappy codec via pseudostreaming) isn't Hulu, and isn't Broadcast.com. Hulu secured content users want to pay for.

Yahoo needs users' attention.

[staunch]

You could browse the web on a mobile phone before the iPhone too...

Windows Media was horrible from a end-user UX perspective (not well integrated into browsers, differences across OSes/browsers, version/codec issues) and required special server software.

RTMP streaming over Flash Communication Server was great on end-user UX but still required special server software.

Real Video/QuickTime sucked on both sides.

There's a world of difference between something being technically possible and being good enough to cause widespread adoption.

There were many streaming businesses that saw small scale success (like Broadcast.com) before Flash 7 was released. Just like there were some fairly successful business built selling Java games on flip phones.

[billturner]

Nothing Broadcast.com did offered any advantage in creating something like YouTube.

This isn't totally correct. Nothing that we did back then, that was exposed to the public, would have offered an advantage for making a YouTube. We had built a system for Yahoo Personals to upload and stream videos, but this functionality was never really released to the public at large. I don't believe it had a big uptake in Personals so it was placed on the back burner.

We had the tools and systems in place to allow something like youtube, but it never saw the (public) light of day.

But, yes, you could be correct in that it would have just been at the wrong time. Who knows.

[burke]

This really seems like a theme for Yahoo!. Delicious comes to mind as another example.