Yahoo! Videocast

» see videocast.yahoo.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Yahoo! JAPAN put the Videocast beta online on 12 April 2007, free to anyone holding a Yahoo! JAPAN ID. It took seventeen file formats, capped each upload at 100 MB, converted everything to Flash Video on arrival and let you publish up to 500 MB of the converted result. At the upload screen, next to the title and the category box, there was a setting for a Creative Commons license. Few Japanese portal products in 2007 offered one.

The official version arrived on 25 July 2007. Yahoo marked the occasion by agreeing to the terms JASRAC was offering video-posting services, which meant the company would pay royalties on music used in videos its users uploaded. Internet Watch reported that the rate itself was still being worked out, and that Yahoo intended to keep negotiating the surrounding conditions with JASRAC.

Then the guidelines made clear what the agreement actually permitted. Using a track off a music CD as it came was prohibited, because the JASRAC deal covered the composition and not the recording, and a video using somebody's master would be deleted. What a user could legally post was a performance of their own, sung unaccompanied or played on an instrument. Yahoo had bought the right to host amateur covers and nothing else.

~ the record ~

~ the rules it followed ~

The licensing was only part of it. Yahoo banned uploads the rights holder had not approved, ran its own patrol staff to find and delete them, and built something it called an intellectual property program, where rights holders who registered in advance could send takedown requests straight to the company by email. The embedding was where the service earned its place: a Videocast clip would drop into a Yahoo! Blog post, a Yahoo! GeoCities page, a Yahoo! bulletin board thread or the Waiwai Map layer on Yahoo! Maps.

All of that describes who Videocast was built for, which is to say a person with a Yahoo! JAPAN ID and a camcorder, inside one country's rights framework. You could not upload a frame without that ID. I was on broadband by 2007 and watching YouTube, which asked nothing of me at the door and handled the rights question after the fact rather than before it. Videocast had done the licensing in the other order, and the catalog it ended up licensed to carry was amateur covers.

~ where it sent everyone ~

GIGAZINE picked up the closure notice on 22 January 2009. From 16 February there would be no new uploads and no more embedding into Yahoo!'s own properties. From 5 April everything would be deleted, videos included, and anyone who wanted their own footage back had to go into the video management screen and pull each file down as FLV.

The notice closed by naming two Yahoo! JAPAN partner sites for anyone who still wanted to post video: zoome and Niconico Douga. zoome went dark on 31 August 2011. Niconico is still running. GIGAZINE's writer noted that Google Video was closing its uploads in the same season and handling it differently, keeping the files and promising a migration tool, and said plainly that Yahoo could at least have kept the movies, while allowing that storage costs money and maybe it really was that tight. Yahoo had spent two years paying for the music on its video site, and spent nothing at all keeping what its users made.

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