Yahoo, who's own video site offering is losing ground to Google's YouTube, the dominant player in the burgeoning online video market, has decided that a makeover is needed if it is to truly compete with YouTube. By the end of the year, Yahoo Video hopes to include more content from media companys and Internet users, attempting to add music videos, movie trailers, television shows, sports highlights, and more. Deals have been signed with both Universal Music Group and EMI Group to host music videos.
"One of our strategies is to put video everywhere you are on the Internet," said Yahoo's general manager for video, Mike Folgner. "We're going to build a much better destination for you to access all this different content." As part of this push for ubiquitous video, Yahoo's Flickr, a popular online photo-sharing site, will also begin to feature videos.
Online video sites are an incredibly hot commodity currently, with more than 130 million Americans viewing 8.36 billion online streams in the month of May, according to marketing research company comScore. Yahoo wants a bigger piece of the pie, as it currently trails in third place with 4.6% of the online video market, behind both News Corp's Fox pages (including MySpace), and YouTube, which comes in first at 22%.
