The company
Yahoo!
Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, and its a ...
ran several similar video services. Yahoo! Video, a
video hosting service
An online video platform (OVP) enables users to upload, convert, store, and play back video content on the Internet, often via a private server structured, large-scale system that may generate revenue. Users will generally upload video content vi ...
, was established in 2006. Later, the ability to upload videos was removed, changing it to a more pure
video on demand
Video on demand (VOD) is a media distribution system that allows users to access videos, television shows and films Digital distribution, digitally on request. These multimedia are accessed without a traditional video playback device and a typica ...
service; the website became a portal for curated video content hosted by Yahoo's properties. In 2011, the service was re-launched as Yahoo! Screen, placing a larger focus on original content and
web series. Created for the service were the series ''
Burning Love'', ''
Electric City'', ''
Ghost Ghirls'', ''
Losing It with John Stamos'', ''
Sin City Saints'', and ''
Other Space''. Yahoo! Screen also acquired the sitcom ''
Community
A community is a social unit (a group of people) with a shared socially-significant characteristic, such as place, set of norms, culture, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given g ...
'' for an additional season, following its cancellation after the fifth season on NBC. In January 2016, following a $42 million write-down on the poor performance of its original content, Yahoo! Screen was shut down. In August 2016, Yahoo! announced a partnership with the subscription video-on-demand service
Hulu
Hulu (, ) is an American Subscription business model, subscription streaming media service owned by Disney Streaming, a subsidiary of the Disney Entertainment segment of the Walt Disney Company. It was launched on October 29, 2007, initially as ...
to move its free video library to a ''de facto'' successor known as Yahoo! View. Yahoo! View streamed recent episodes of television series from the
ABC,
NBC, and
Fox networks in the United States, as well as a moderate selection of archived programs from various distributors, the "
skinny bundle" model. Yahoo! View was decommissioned on June 30, 2019.
History
Yahoo! Video was intended to be as a
video sharing website on which users could upload videos, similar to
YouTube
YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...
. At launch, Yahoo! Video started as an internet-wide video
search engine
A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...
. Yahoo added the ability to upload and share video clips in June 2006. A re-designed site was launched in February 2008 that changed the focus to Yahoo!-hosted video only.
On December 15, 2010, Yahoo! Video's functionality to upload video was removed for its relaunch as Yahoo! Screen the following year. All user-generated content was removed on March 15, 2011.
The content that Yahoo! deleted was saved by the
Archive Team. The Yahoo! Screen rebrand was launched October 2011, alongside eight original programs.
Yahoo! Screen has streamed three seasons of its Emmy-nominated
original series, ''
Burning Love'', which was syndicated for TV through
E! in 2013.
On April 24, 2013, Yahoo! acquired rights to stream content from the
NBC series ''
Saturday Night Live
''Saturday Night Live'' (''SNL'') is an American Late night television in the United States, late-night live television, live sketch comedy variety show created by Lorne Michaels and developed by Michaels and Dick Ebersol that airs on NBC. The ...
'', including archive clips from current and past seasons, behind the scenes footage, and other content. Yahoo! held non-exclusive international rights to the archive content, and non-exclusive rights to clips from the current season.
In June 2014, Yahoo! announced that it had picked up former
NBC sitcom ''
Community
A community is a social unit (a group of people) with a shared socially-significant characteristic, such as place, set of norms, culture, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given g ...
'' for its
sixth season, which premiered via Yahoo! Screen on March 17, 2015.
Within a month of ''Communitys season six premiere, Yahoo! had premiered full first seasons of two new original series, ''
Sin City Saints'' and ''
Other Space'', but available only in the United States. Also in 2014, Yahoo! expanded its licensing agreement with
Vevo to allow Vevo's content (music videos, concerts, etc.) to appear on the platform. ''Community'' ultimately would not be as profitable for the company as it hoped with ''
The A.V. Club'' blaming the acquisition for the platform's eventual demise.
In June 2015, Yahoo! Screen won the worldwide rights to distribute the
National Football League
The National Football League (NFL) is a Professional gridiron football, professional American football league in the United States. Composed of 32 teams, it is divided equally between the American Football Conference (AFC) and the National ...
's
International Series game between the
Buffalo Bills
The Buffalo Bills are a professional American football team based in the Buffalo–Niagara Falls metropolitan area. The Bills compete in the National Football League (NFL) as a member of the American Football Conference (AFC) AFC East, East div ...
and
Jacksonville Jaguars
The Jacksonville Jaguars are a professional American football team based in Jacksonville, Florida. The Jaguars compete in the National Football League (NFL) as a member of the American Football Conference (AFC) AFC South, South division. The team ...
, set to take place October 25. The one-off stream was the first NFL game to be broadcast almost exclusively through the Internet, with no
television broadcast outside Buffalo, Jacksonville and other international markets.
On January 4, 2016, following a $42 million write-down in the third quarter of 2015, as a result of the poor performance of its three original series, Yahoo! Screen as a portal was discontinued. Yahoo's original video content was re-located to relevant portals of the site; in particular, its original television series were moved to an "originals" section on the Yahoo! TV site.
On August 8, 2016, Hulu announced they would end their free viewing tier and move exclusively to a subscription service. That same day, they announced a partnership with Yahoo! to spin out its free video on demand streaming service, which features recent episodes of series from
ABC,
NBC, and
Fox, into a new service known as ''Yahoo! View''. It features the five most recent episodes of the networks' series; new episodes are added eight days after their original broadcast. It also integrated with
Tumblr
Tumblr (pronounced "tumbler") is a microblogging and Social networking service, social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and is owned by American company Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content ...
to provide access to fan content related to programs.
Yahoo View! ceased operations on June 30, 2019.
See also
*
List of Yahoo! Screen original programming
References
External links
*
*
{{Oath Inc.
Advertising video on demand
Former video hosting services
Screen
Streaming media systems
Internet properties established in 2006
Internet properties disestablished in 2011
Internet properties established in 2011
Internet properties disestablished in 2016
Internet properties established in 2016
Internet properties disestablished in 2019
Defunct video on demand services