One more go-round for Yahoo Video, this time in widescreen

By Tim Conneally | Published February 15, 2008, 11:28 AM

Yahoo has relaunched its Yahoo! Video service, increasing the viewer's aspect ratio and supported movie file size.

Relaunching is something Yahoo's getting more experienced at these days, and it's not even a stranger to relaunching its video site. But whatever Yahoo had been doing lately in that department, it didn't "stick" like Google's video search and YouTube's video presentation.

This morning's non-announced re-launch comes complete with an overhauled embeddable "widescreen" viewer. Its new aspect ratio is 16:9, or 96 x 54, a high-definition videographic standard. By comparison, YouTube offers a 4:3, or 72 x 54 aspect ratio. A side-by-side viewing of a Yahoo-hosted video against the same video on YouTube shows the difference this change makes.

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One BetaNews tester noted the sound quality of the YouTube video exceeded that of Yahoo, but this is likely related to choice of compression, as both sites claim MP3-quality audio.

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With the company's strong advertising portfolio, including BlueLithium, and the well-publicized Right Media acquisition last year, a video site that offers a slightly better viewer than its competitors is an exploitable commodity.

Additionally, users are now allowed to upload files up to 150 MB in size. But the site is no longer just user-generated content, but it now features videos from other Yahoo properties.

Yahoo's recent layoff of 1,000 employees including the head of Yahoo Advanced technology division, Brickhouse, and Yahoo Personals, does not bode well for the company, which is resisting, for now, Microsoft's buyout offer.

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