Yahoo plans to overhaul its scattered video offerings in the face of YouTube dominance by offering a single channel for music videos, movie trailers, television shows and sports highlights. Also, Yahoo’s photo-sharing site Flickr will be adding video.. In an interview with Bloomberg, Mike Folgner, the GM for video, said that the internet portal’s approach to video has been to offer video “everywhere you are on the internet.” The new philosophy rests on creating a single destination where users can access Yahoo’s far-flung videos.
So far, Yahoo has an existing deal with Universal Music Group. It has newer content deals with AP and CNN, as well as sports leagues such as the NFL ad MLB. “We already have a lot of these deals,” said Folgner, who joined Yahoo when it bought video site Jumpcut last year. “We just don’t service them in one place so you don’t see them. We’ll be able to drive a lot of traffic at this.” Yahoo certain has room to grow in that area. According to comScore rankings, of the 8.36 billion video streams viewed in May, Google, which acquired YouTube last year, was number one. It accounted for 21.5 percent of viewed video streams, while Yahoo was a distant third at 4.6 percent — behind Fox Interactive (including MySpace) with 8.1 percent.
— Besides a new focus on video, as CEO Jerry Yang continues the 100-day review he began on July 17, Bear Stearns analyst Robert Peck guesses that the company is strongly considering making a move toward social networking. In a 22-page report titled “Yahoo’s 100 Day Review: What Should Yahoo Do Regarding Social Networks?” Peck succinctly answers his report’s question by stating emphatically that Yahoo needs to step up its initiatives in this area — through acquisition or partnership — relatively soon, or risk being marginalized in some of their businesses. Attempting to provide a roadmap for what it could cost Yahoo to acquire a social net rather than build one from scratch, Peck offers Facebook as a suitable yardstick to measure other independent community sites against. He estimates the social net’s current value as ranging between $5-$6 billion. The full report is available here as a PDF.
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