WebProNews

The launch of Yahoo Live, and its associated developer APIs, enable people to create live videos and webcast them immediately.

At the Yahoo Live blog about the debut of the Yahoo Live service, they give credit to the engineering team for getting it out the door in six months. We can appreciate that effort too, probably more so if the service wasn't down for maintenance at the moment.

For people who directly benefit from performing live for an audience, Yahoo Live provides an alternative to recording videos and posting them to social media sites like YouTube or MySpace. Fans see the show, and a savvy artist gains the opportunity to steer them to buying related merchandise.

We won't be surprised in the least if an adult content provider, amateur or professional, hooks into Yahoo Live as part of a chance to monetize a live performance, if you catch our drift. Since Yahoo Live has gone down for repairs, we aren't able to see if terms of service permit this creative usage of the service.

On the Yahoo Live API side, the engineers noted the release of web services and embeddable Flash objects for it. Developers will use them to embed live video, get data or snapshots of previous broadcasts, and discover who is on the air at the moment.

Yahoo Live may gain competition even before they have the chance to get it running in a stable fashion. Mathew Ingram wondered how long it would take before YouTube launched a similar service.