As discussed here. It’s not rumors anymore. Meedio is now a part of Yahoo. Welcome MeeHoo, Yahoodeeo or whatever. Meedio is IMHO one of the best media front ends out there. The platform is very solid and flexible. It has a very strong user community and huge amounts of possibilities. Now Yahoo has to play their cards carefully.
This is on the home page of Meedio today:
Important News About Meedio
Today is a big day for the team here at Meedio; we have sold most of our technology to Yahoo!
David Brott, Jeff (beergeek), Kenny (fasttech), Pedro (flea0) and I are joining Yahoo!’s Digital Home team. We’ve had the opportunity to spend a lot of time with Yahoo! in the past few months and we love the way they are developing the best, most user-friendly services for the Digital Home.
As I said before, behind Meedio LLC the company, is Meedio the idea and all of us want to see it succeed. The sad truth is that we had recently hit a brick wall and did not have the resources to make it flourish. But, Yahoo! has a great team that is just as dedicated and passionate as we are in this space and, of course, they carry the content and might of an early Internet pioneer. Together, the combination can be nothing but a winner. We are thrilled at the opportunity to put the Meedio idea together with the Yahoo! experience and bring it to millions of people all around the world!
To be perfectly honest with you, before I wrote the first line of Meedio code, I envisioned a day when it could be used as the “new browser”; to bring all the content goodness that Yahoo! can provide to the 10 foot world. It is really exciting seeing it actually happen.
- Let’s hope that Yahoo keeps the platform open
- That they take good care of the strong existing user community
- That they integrate Meedio closely with their existing content
- That they start delivering proper EPG data for more than the US
- That they understand that digital capture cards and HD give them a competetive edge
…and let’s hope that Pablo and the team just got stinkin’ rich!
Now, when will Yahoo buy YouTube and integrate it into Meedio? And what will Google do regarding our living room and the very intense battle that the other big players are having regarding that space?
Video content still feels very comfortable on the big screen in front of the couch. If Google want to compete with Apple and their FrontRow, Microsoft and their Media Center Edition and now Yahoo and their Meedio front end they have to do something with the available fornt ends for Google Video.
Google:
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/03/google-interactive-tv.html
Online videos from sites like Youtube lacks one important feature: Quality. Mostly the videos arent good enough to be displayed fullscreen on a HTPC I think.
Oh, and hopefully you somehow can get Meehoo without the Yahoo logo on each screen….
Hm. Why should Yahoo buy them and NOT put their logo on it?
Trond A Says:
That is correct, but when trying to predict the future of technology there are some very reliable factors that you can always count on. One of them is: “The quality will be better”
When they included cameras in mobile phones the quality was total crap. Still, if you want to predict somethg about where this is going you can count on the fact that the quality will be better.
So will the quality on YouTube and GoogleVideo. Righ now it is not good enough for any big screen living room experience, but it will be. And Yahoo will be there with a platform to present it in your living room.
Oyvind: Nothing, but I dont want to have a company logo on each screen on my HTPC
. Not even MS got it. I suppose that in an advertbased system it would be natural, but if you can buy Meehoo I would like to have the option to make it look like I want to.
Eirikso: Yes, I agree on that, though you would still be limited to the quality of the videos uploaded by the users though (atleast with the current businessmodel of YouTube)
Yes. There’s a long way to go before the picture quality on YouTube will be good for your 56″ LCD…
And for “The quality will always be better” you can of course say:
WTF! The quality on YouTube in general is worse than the worst VHS I have ever seen…
Personally I currently have more faith in download based systems like Democracy, TVTonic and Akimbo.
Yes, and the quality on even the best mobile phones is still worse than the crappiest film cameras we all used only 5 years ago…
- Let’s hope that Yahoo keeps the plaform open.
What’s a “plaform”?
All websites should have spell checker intergration.
Nice website, easy on the eyes, & a lot of scrolling.
I have now fixed the typo. Thanks for mentioning!