9 months after we asked how Yahoo! Live would ever make money, they decided they can’t and will shut their doors December 3rd.
On a day where the Premier League lashed out at Justin.tv for their lax policies on taking down illegal content, it’s worth asking if Yahoo!, a company with real revenue and existing video delivery scale can’t afford to pay for bandwith, how much longer can some of the other players in live streaming space survive. How will they make money?
The answer is subscription sales, or ad sales, or both, but the former requires a rabid audience, the latter requires more targeted advertising, and both require scale and low content delivery costs to be successful.
blogtv.com seems to be doing okay. Huge audiences to the right shows, and they’ve been shooting up the Alexa rankings over the last three months.