Adobe Success Story

Yahoo! plans to adopt Adobe AIR to debut client extension to Y! Live—a new experiment in live collaborative video for social broadcasters and developers

Yahoo! Inc. is a leading global Internet brand and one of the most trafficked Internet destinations worldwide. Yahoo! is focused on powering its communities of users, advertisers, publishers, and developers by creating indispensable experiences built on trust.

The Yahoo! Advanced Products team is a small incubator group tasked with developing innovative new concepts and bringing them out to market quickly. The team focuses on market-driven innovation—looking at new startups, global trends, and academic research to identify emerging opportunities—then rapidly launches experimental products and services that spread virally and are iterated according to feedback in the open marketplace.

“Y! Live is an iterative experiment in the nascent space of live social video, which we think will become an area of increasing creativity and innovation” says Michael Quoc, Director of Advanced Products at Yahoo! “We’ve built it from the ground up to serve as a tool to broadcasters, remixers, and developers—our goal is to give them a platform to create their own live video experiences.”

Project Details

Democratizing broadcast on AIR
Y! Live lets users display, hack, and mashup live video streams on websites or client applications and embed them into blogs, websites, and social networking pages. On Y! Live, there are limitless channels for many-to-many broadcasting and for tuning into other people’s channels. The video and audio are in real time, so as a user is watching someone’s channel or broadcasting their own, they can interact chat-room style with other co-viewers.

“Our plans for the Adobe AIR Y! Live application are that it will give users that precious ‘always-on’ experience that we want to offer to the semi-professional target audience. People won’t inadvertently close the application or navigate away from it,” says Quoc.

With the persistent presence of an Adobe AIR application, not only does Yahoo! better seal its brand, but users benefit from desktop notifications to stay constantly aware of when a Y! Live connection starts a broadcast or undergoes a change in status. “The notion of combining live TV and social interaction beyond the confines of a browser is paramount to us,” says Ted Chen, Senior Director, Business Development, Yahoo!.

Built with Adobe Flex, targeting developers
A unique aspect of the offering is that in addition to queuing up a live broadcast at will—users can directly interact with multiple people at any time, which is different than posting a video and looking at comments. There is an immediacy to the service, and a definite attractiveness as an accessible platform for developers. Developers who are already garnering information can augment that engagement by adding social live video to user experiences.

Both the web and desktop versions of Y! Live were built using Adobe Flex 2, as well as a host of other backend tools. “The debugger is great, and the Adobe Flex framework plus MXML enables me to rapidly create rich user interface patterns. I can’t imagine having gotten this far this fast without Adobe Flex,” says Eric Fixler, lead developer for Y! Live.

---

Do you have a story you would like to share? Join the Adobe Customer Reference Program.