Web video is maturing, with original programming coming to online content companies. Following hot on the heels of the likes of Netflix, Yahoo! is getting into the original programming game with Electric City.

Electric City

Tom Hanks has had a series in mind for many years, but he’s been waiting for the right opportunity to get it out to the public. That opportunity has now arrived thanks to the Internet.

According to the Associated Press, Electric City will premiere on Yahoo! in the spring. There will be 20 episodes, each 3- to 4-minutes long, of the animated series which taps into social issues.

Gary Goetzman, co-founder of Playtone, Hanks’ production company, said, “It was always our intent to have this project live and breathe online, and we felt Yahoo! would be the perfect home.”

Yahoo! has been upping its original content, but Electric City represents its first foray into scripted programming.

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Hulu is being sold off, of that there is no question. But everything else, it would seem, is being questioned. From the chances of achieving profitability to the possibility that the content will vanish from the company’s grasp in the future.

Hulu Bids Incoming

The deadline for bidders to submit the figure they are willing to pay to acquire Hulu has reportedly been extended from until the end of the week. This is to allow potential buyers more time to study the financials of the company to ensure they stack up against the considerable asking price.

Hulu is looking for bids in the region of $2 billion, which would seem excessive when revenue has only just hit $500 million for the year and profitability is still some way off. There are also other questions being asked by those in the know, especially related to the longterm future of the business.

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Yahoo’s Yahoo! Connected TV platform may be set to get some licensed video-on-demand content from Disney. That’s the same Disney which has blocked Google TV from accessing its content. Then again, this content may not be that good.

Connected TV Platforms

Connected TV platforms are coming at us thick and fast, with the likes of Apple (Apple TV), Google (Google TV), and Boxee (Boxee Box) having released their own in recent months, and that’s just a small selection of those now on offer to consumers.

Yahoo! Connected TV has been with us for a while, and is currently available in 70 different models of television. However, the apps available on it up to now have mostly been widgets (read Web apps) such as those for Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon. In other words, not video content.

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As part of an extensive series of cuts and closures at Yahoo!, Yahoo! Video is closing its doors, or as Yahoo! so sweetly puts it, is “changing.” So that’s thousands more people heading to YouTube for their online video, surely.

Yahoo! Evolving

Yahoo! is currently undergoing an extreme change, with those in charge, particularly CEO Carol Bartz, attempting to make deep cuts in order to save money and keep the company chugging along into the far future.

The last week has seen hundreds of staff told their soon to be out of a job, while various products under the Yahoo! banner are being closed or combined with others. Controversially, those being closed include De.licio.us and MyBlogLog.

And it looks as though Yahoo! Video is affected as well.

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Online video is growing ever more popular, particularly in the United States. But it’s YouTube which continues to drive market penetration, with Hulu leading the rest of the growing pack.

Online Video Viewer Stats

Online video is showing no signs of slowing down in growth. As the latest comScore statistics for December 2009 show.

178 million Internet users in the U.S. watched online video during the last month of the decade. Which equates to almost 87 percent market penetration.

Between them they watched over 33 billion videos in December, or the equivalent of 187 videos each. The average length of video now stands at 4.1 minutes, up from 3.5 minutes around the same time last year.

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DeliTV is a Yahoo Pipe created by Tony Hirst, a lecturer at The Open University in the UK.

This pipe allows anyone to program their own online TV channel from Boxee by bookmarking pages on Delicious with the tag “delitv”.

• Yahoo Pipes is a tool that aggregates and manipulates all sorts of content from the web.
• Boxee is free software that streams content from sites like MLB, Netflix, Pandora, Last.fm, and Flickr on a laptop or connected to a TV.

DeliTV supports:

• BBC iPlayer category feeds
• podcast feeds
• Youtube videos
• Youtube Playlists
• Youtube channels
• another DeliTV playlist
• an MP3 file

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As Yahoo prepares a new version of its Yahoo Messenger chat application, a beta version of Yahoo Messenger 10 is already downloadable for Windows users.

For this version of the application, Yahoo has focused its attention on webcam features. The selling point on this update is the ability to start high-quality video calls with audio. Until now, users could make low-quality video calls with no audio feature.

This new feature will only work for one-to-one calls to other users with the same version. The older ability to broadcast your webcam to multiple users (no audio) has not been updated.

From the Yahoo Messenger Blog:

Features include the ability to swap video windows, position the video windows side-by-side, mute the call or place it on hold. You can even go full-screen with your video call. To get started, click the new “Video Call” button in the IM window.

Video of New Features:

In addition to the video update, Yahoo has made a few other improvements:

• Real-time stream of updates from Twitter, Yahoo Buzz, last.fm, etc.
• Start chat from updates (recent activity, availability)
• New ways to sort contacts
• Updated icon designs

I don’t know anybody who uses Yahoo Messenger anymore; most of my friends have migrated to Skype or Google Chat. However, they either have enough users that Yahoo would bother to invest in building up the video application or else they are trying to attract users from other apps.

Complaints Already Pouring In

Despite the Beta tag, over 100 comments on the Yahoo Messenger Blog are complaints about design, missing features and user friendliness.  At least 20 bugs were found by users within the first few hours of release, which will hopefully be fixed for the final version.

Personally, I think they’ve lost this fight, although Y! Messenger seems to be very popular in some European countries. Several commenters from Romania are begging for a translation; one said:

Oh come on Romanians are mega-fans of Y! Messenger… it’s a true phenomenon… we even have the word “mes” to denote Y! Messenger in sentences like “hai intră pe mes” (”go log in on Y! Messenger”)

Get Yahoo Messenger 10

Download:
Version 10 Beta Available at Yahoo

You may also be interested in:

• WebTVWire’s Free Video Chat Guide
• Trillian – Use AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN, ICQ and Gtalk, Skype Twitter & more all in one program.

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