Yahoo! was ahead of the curve!

Back in early 2000, Yahoo! rolled out a delivery platform for streaming live video and text content targeting financial viewers during market hours. It was unique yet I'll bet you never heard of it. The Vision™ platform was innovative in that it allowed users to create a customized My Yahoo!™ type page, which consisted of a multi-pane browser. This contained a live video feed, data pushed into another pane by a person referred to as a Data Wrangler, as well as the user's own stock or email information and lastly another pane for searches and displaying web pages.
There were two field reporters, Bertha Coombs and Mary Snow, one at the NYSE and the other at the NASDAQ, reporting on stories throughout the day. Feeds were sent from small booths at the exchanges to a local New York City fiber hub, which then sent the content to the main Yahoo! studio in California via a Vyvx™ MPEG-2 compressed TV-1 circuit, at 3Mbps as memory serves. Content was edited in some cases or fed raw via tape playback down the line.

The delivery side of the user's page was somewhat customizable as you could view the entire browser, parts of it or collapse to see only the video window, which was 288x216 pixels. The content was streamed at 56 Kbps or 100-300Kbps. Both WM and Real players were supported.

What made this early attempt at IPTV so remarkable, aside from the fact that it ran five days a week, was it had significant interactivity for the user to view live or archived content as well as participate by answering polls or emailing questions, which could be addressed to someone being interviewed live from their California studios. In addition, the Data Wrangler would push text content and links into the data window during a live interview so that viewers could obtain more information about the story as it was happening, it was not passive viewing. Also, it had advertising spots and the final product looked like television.

Why did Yahoo! pull the plug on FinanceVision? I was not in the room so to speak, however, there was no major advertising for it (many people I knew in the financial markets had not heard of it), some complained about the laid-back style of the California based studio anchors, they were competing for eyeballs along with the likes of CNBC, and lastly perhaps Yahoo! did not yet possess the Vision of what FinanceVision represented to their viewers: the first example of prime time IPTV. It was ahead of its time, from the application of the technology and the UI, to the people who were working in a brand new medium. In the end, it failed to reach a sustainable market share to make it profitable.

Perhaps it will rise again in a new form.

Also See, Return of Y! Vision Platform