Yahoo’s 21st Century Entertainment Network
Yahoo Go is finally starting to look interesting. I’ll admit that I was skeptical about Go when it was unveiled at this year’s CES. I generally try to avoid Ellen Degeneres in any context. A presentation that spends a half hour transferring Ellen’s photos from her cell phone to the web is not my idea of cutting edge. The mediocre CES presentation made Go seem like a grab-bag of digital lifestyle applications that weren’t notable in any particular way.
With last week’s launch of Yahoo’s DVR software, Go started to make quite a bit more sense.
Most of the early reviews of Yahoo’s DVR application focused on the fact that it works with any standard PC television tuner to provide roughly the same set of features a TiVo provides. As a result, many have speculated that the move was an attempt by Yahoo to move into TiVo’s territory.
I’m not convinced Yahoo is aiming for TiVo. Despite TiVo’s recent patent victories, the company still isn’t doing all that well. There’s really not much to be gained by building a TiVo-killer.
Instead, I think we’re witnessing Yahoo’s transformation from Internet portal to media company. Not a traditional media company, but the media company of the future. With Go, Yahoo is attempting to build a new type of entertainment network. A digital lifestyle entertainment network.
Unlike 20th century entertainment networks, Go will be multi-media and multi-modal. Programming will likely cross boundaries from television to cell-phone to radio and back again. And consumers are likely to create their own programming that can easily be shared through social networks which will be built into the foundation of Yahoo’s network.
While Yahoo has been busy making seemingly random acquisitions of Web 2.0 companies, they’ve also been diligent about making API’s available for almost everything they do. The result is that Yahoo’s network could become the platform of choice for content creators looking to leverage Yahoo’s technology to reach a Yahoo-sized audience. Once this happens, Yahoo’s network will gain some serious momentum.
Yahoo’s DVR amounts to a proof of concept for the new era of convergent media. Consumers can share their photos on Flickr, then easily view them on their TV. In the future your DVR will find your home videos on your network, then allow you to share them on YouTube.
While we’ve all been focused on the recent phenomenon of television programming moving to the Internet, we’re missing a more significant phenomenon. The Internet is coming to television - and not in a lame WebTV sort of way. Yahoo is building a platform that will allow web applications to extend their reach to the living room.
When the traditional networks complain about making their programming available on portals they might as well be admitting that they don’t have a vision of the future. API’s mean nothing to old-school media companies - which is one of the reasons why CBS, et al, are unlikely to fair well in the coming era of convergence media.
I’m not even going to complain about Yahoo’s DVR being Windows-only because it’s only one piece of a much larger offering. It’s only a matter of time before someone creates a Yahoo compatible DVR for OSX. That’s the beauty of an open platform.
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2 Comment(s) so far
1. Medialoper » The Weekly ‘Loper - May 7, 2006 wrote on May 7th, 2006 at 9:33 am
[...] Yahoo’s 21st Century Entertainment Network — Yahoo! is making the transformation from a 20th Century Web Portal to a 21st Century Digital Lifestyle Entertainment Network. [...]
2. Times emit » Blog Archive » Converged vision wrote on May 7th, 2006 at 11:44 am
[...] Fascinating article in medialoper about the vision they see as Yahoo’s for the converged entertainment platform of the 21st century. [...]