Review: Yahoo TV – The 9 Beta

The girl is hot, the content is funny, its Web 2.0, how could I refuse! The 9 is a Yahoo! TV product which takes the Yahoo staffs 9 best picks of the day, and wraps them up into one little package with a little snippit of each video and links to the full video at another website.

I’ve found the flash player Yahoo is using to power the video stream to be quite buggy, especially when I want to use the timeline to jump back to a certain part of the video if I missed something. They’ll need to keep working on the player before I’m comfortable with viewing the video every day because it frustrates me when something as simple as a video player doesn’t work, but it seems that YouTube can’t quite get it right either – or maybe I’m just too fussy?

The 3 days I’ve been to the site, there has been at least one link to a peice of Yahoo’s own content somewhere in the 9, but because it’s somewhat of a user driven this may be just luck of the draw for Yahoo’s revenue margins. You’re able to vote for the Pepsi 10th, which is an item that you think should have been in the days 9, but didn’t make it, which I think is a great way of providing the team some feedback about what content you and other viewers like, which might shape the content they show in the 9 each day.

I think this product has some potential to raise some money for Yahoo (with their obvious advertising deal with Pepsi – which I’ll never buy anyway) but also to get users viewing more online video, which will be the way of the future. I’ve spent several days going through old episodes of The Screen Savers from the TechTV days on YouTube, and I’m loving it! Visit The 9 Beta at http://9.yahoo.com/.