Yahoo Live gestates for 9 months, won’t survive delivery

Remember Yahoo Live? Probably not. It’s Yahoo’s attempt at doing live video streaming over the Internet. It got some buzz when it launched back in February as Yahoo was the first of the large Internet companies to step into the space. But since then, it’s just lingered in obscurity and today, the company is announcing its death.

From the Yahoo Live blog post:

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Our mission here on the Brickhouse team is to quickly develop product ideas that can add value to Yahoo! as a whole. To do this effectively we constantly evaluate our early-stage products and sometimes have to make the hard decision to move on, in order to continue exploring new territory and developing new products.

So it is with great sadness that I share the news that Yahoo! Live, a Brickhouse project in social broadcasting will be going off the air on 3 December 2008. We’d like to thank everyone who has participated. Without all of you, Y!Live would not have built the strong community that it has. It has been really interesting (and entertaining) to see all of the ways broadcasters have used Live, developing it into a place for all sorts of social interactions.

As they note, users will have one month left to use it before it goes offline on December 3. Yahoo is also hosting a townhall meeting on Wednesday to wish Yahoo Live farewell. Y!Live (the service’s abbreviation) has already been removed from the Yahoo Developer page, as The Industry Standard notes.

Yahoo uses the death notice of Yahoo Live to promote Fire Eagle, its location-based service that also recently launched out of its Brickhouse division. This is followed by a mention of its Next blog which has a lead story about “Fire Eagle App Explosion.” I’m going to go ahead and take in that post with a grain of salt. With things looking awfully bleak at Yahoo in recent months, one can’t help but wonder if that will be yet another promising project that falls by the wayside.

I just tried to boot up Yahoo Live for the first time in months to grab a screenshot…and it crashed my browser. An appropriate send off, I think.